Author’s note: if you are the type of reader who uses Post-it notes to mark clues, and has a Google doc to keep track of plot threads and suspects, the following may prove unnecessary. But if you are having trouble (heh) remembering the pertinent details of the previous books, you might find this section useful. I promise you, by the end of Book 4, the identity of the Stranger should be obvious to anyone who’s paying attention. 😉
Jenny note: you’re such a fucking troll.
Previously, on Trouble…
Jenny Valentine, aka Trouble, returns home to Blackbird Springs, CA after living nearly all her life with her Aunt Shelly in Los Angeles. She is 16 years old, and about to begin her junior year at a new school. Her father is RJ Valentine: famed author of the Trouble: Girl Detective junior readers mysteries. She’s never met him, never even spoken or written to him, but she’s well aware—and obsessed with—the fictional counterpart he created because he couldn’t be a part of her life: Trouble, a precocious girl detective, forever 11 years old, who always solves the mystery, but only after making things 10 times worse first. In the books, Trouble is opposed by a tall, dark, and strangesome menace (beware!), known sometimes as Killroy, but usually as the Stranger. A popular fan theory is that the Stranger is actually fictional Trouble’s father, setting up mysteries for his daughter to solve.
RJ’s Trouble books have made him rich and successful, millions of little girls and boys read them in grade school, but it’s been five years since the 12th one came out. When Jenny is summoned to his mansion, she thinks she’s finally going to meet him at last. Instead, she learns he passed away the night before. RJ sustained a head injury three weeks prior, was hospitalized in a coma, and eventually died. Jenny has been summoned to his will reading. His executor, Mr. Webb, reads the will, and it’s full of surprises. RJ names seven heirs, and to each, he leaves a single heirloom. RJ claims in the will that he was murdered, and each heirloom is a clue that could lead to his killer. Whoever solves his murder will inherit the entire Valentine fortune, valued at $272 million. As executor of the estate, it’s up to Mr. Webb to determine if the murder has been sufficiently proven and award the prize.
The first heir is Valerie Valentine, Jenny’s evil stepmother. Jenny was born from an affair RJ had with Laura Onishi, his grad school teacher’s assistant, while Val was pregnant. There is no love lost between the two, as Jenny blames Val for her mother’s death. Laura died in a car accident five days after Jenny’s birth. Laura was driving in a rainstorm after learning that Val had given birth to a son. Jenny was in the car and miraculously survived. Val’s heirloom is a bottle of wine, the famed, priceless Ressort Rouge petite sirah, of 1998 vintage.
Next is Declan Dillion, a local ne’er-do-well (and Val’s cousin, Jenny will later learn). Declan’s heirloom is a tarot card. Jenny’s half-brother Jack Valentine is the third heir, and he receives an onyx blackbird statue. Fellow high school junior Alicia Aaron is bequeathed an old-fashioned skeleton key. Alicia, who walks with a prosthetic left leg after an unspecified accident, has seemingly no connection to RJ, Jenny, or anyone else in the Valentine family.
Yvonne Griffin, the local newspaper editor and RJ’s old friend, is the fifth heir. She receives a faded hardcover novel called The Stranger of Sausalito, which Jenny has been unable to locate any other copies of. Sixth is the town sheriff, Blake Lockhart. RJ leaves Lockhart a noose—seemingly connected to an old murder case the two quarreled over. And finally, Jenny herself is the seventh heir. She receives a photo of RJ and Laura when her mother was very pregnant. In the photo, Laura is making what appears to be a peace sign. Upon further inspection, Jenny determines that the photo was candid, not posed, and her parents did not know they were being filmed. It’s a blackmail photo.
Jenny meets Drew Porter in town, and the two become fast friends after each saves the other’s life from mysterious mishaps that seem to follow Jenny around. She swears she sees a real-life Stranger watching her, but could just be imagining it. Drew is a big Trouble fan and is psyched to be her sidekick. Jenny also meets Drew’s friends Penny and Mason: Yvonne’s daughter, and Lockhart’s son, respectively. She also meets Dinah Black, Jack’s girlfriend. Those two soon break up, and Jenny is delighted to find a mutual attraction with Dinah.
Declan Dillion tries to entice Jenny with a deal: they could both sell their heirlooms to private collectors for a load of cash and forget the mystery. As they discuss this in a commercial wine cellar, the Stranger appears and murders Declan. Jenny barely gets away, and because there are no other witnesses, Lockhart and the police are reluctant to believe her story. Her credibility is further tarnished by causing a scene at Declan’s wake. Jenny does this to stop Val from drinking poisoned wine, but in the process, it is revealed that Jenny spent time in a mental facility. That’s where she was, the night of RJ’s attack. Her alibi is sound, but her reputation is shattered.
Through her sleuthing, Jenny learns that Val’s wine bottle heirloom is a counterfeit, created by a secret cabal of local city workers and the funeral home undertaker, who have restarted a dead vineyard to sell to wealthy wine aficionados at exorbitant prices. The bottle ended up in RJ’s hands by mistake. The wine forgers tried to poison RJ to keep him quiet, but they were unsuccessful and RJ ended up dead of another cause.
As Jenny learns all this, the Undertaker kidnaps her and Dinah from the annual harvest festival. With ingenuity and luck, they get away, and the Undertaker is killed. Jenny meets with Tori Valentine, Val’s daughter from her first marriage, to interview her about RJ’s attack. Tori gets Jenny drunk and then calls the police on her. Even though Jenny miraculously passes the breathalyzer test, she is sent to jail for the weekend anyway.
When Jenny is released, she calls the heirs to Valentine Manor, announcing she can solve the case. First, she explains the wine bottle mystery and exposes the city worker accomplices, who confess and are arrested. Scratch off one heirloom clue: the wine bottle is solved. Then Jenny uses other scraps of evidence, Val’s lack of an alibi the night of RJ’s injury, and some help from Penny and Drew to prove that Val murdered RJ. They find the murder weapon (a bloodstained chess piece paperweight) in her purse, with RJ’s blood on it. It’s an airtight solution. Val is arrested, and Jenny inherits the fortune. On her first night in the mansion, she awakes to find that the Stranger has broken in and left her a warning. He killed RJ, not Val. Jenny already assumed as much, since she framed Val with the assistance of her secret, identical twin sister Eliza, aka Danger.
Eliza was still in neonatal care when their mother died in the car crash. Laura had demanded that her nurse promise to protect Eliza if anything happened to her. When Laura dies, and a strange man comes around asking about her babies, the nurse fakes a death certificate for Eliza, adopts her under a different name, and moves with her to Sacramento. Eliza grows up with no clue of her sister, or her famous father. When the nurse takes ill with early-onset Alzheimer’s, she reveals Eliza’s true parentage. The nurse dies and Eliza runs away to find her sister. They eventually meet on the roof of the psych ward where Jenny is being held. Jenny had been planning to kill herself over a terrible romantic experience until she discovers she has a twin. From then on, Eliza lives in the shadows, a secret to even Aunt Shelly, and occasionally assumes Jenny’s identity when Jenny needs to go sleuthing while maintaining an alibi.
Jenny’s heirloom clue, the photo of her parents, was a sly reference to her twin and led to a dossier on Eliza. Because Jenny already knew about the twin, she considers the photo heirloom solved.
In the winter, Eliza tracks down the original owner of Declan’s tarot card heirloom, an old Fortune Teller who had beef with RJ. With the help of Drew (who Eliza has a crush on), Eliza solves the tarot card mystery using Jenny’s identity. The Fortune Teller was waiting for RJ in a hotel room he rented in town, the night of RJ’s attack. But RJ never showed up. Another heirloom down.
Meanwhile, Jenny is dating Dinah, and the stress of sharing an identity with her is weighing on Eliza. When a local girl ends up dead in a similar fashion to the old Casey Klein murder case connected to Sheriff Lockhart’s noose heirloom, Jenny is on the hunt. Doing her part, Eliza befriends the mother of Casey Klein while investigating the cold case. Interest in the case brings a sleazy reporter to town, who seeks payment from Val to clear her name and will blackmail Jenny if he can. At school, Jenny meets Meghan May and her Bitchy Brigade of popular girls. Meghan is secretly dating Mason, and more secretly, raising a child they had together and are hiding from their parents. Jenny discovers this information and uses it to force Mason to do her favors and steal evidence—until Mason catches Jenny and Eliza together and uncovers their own big secret. The twins and Mason agree to a détente, keeping each other’s secrets if Jenny will pay for Mason’s childcare expenses.
These secrets and more inspire an anonymous troll called the Ghostwriter to begin posting salacious gossip about Blackbird Springs Academy’s student body. Eliza, being tech-savvy, identifies the culprit immediately, and challenges old-fashioned Jenny to figure it out on her own. But Jenny is busy with the noose heirloom cold case. She identifies a suspect with a posthumous hint RJ left her. When she goes to interview the suspect at a bar, the sleazy reporter is eavesdropping. The Stranger appears and beats the reporter to a pulp. Watching from afar, Eliza sees the Stranger remove his mask, revealing their half-brother Jack underneath. When confronted, Jack claims he was just trying to scare the reporter off with the costume, as the reporter had been trying to get his hooks into Val.
Jenny is dubious and tries to bait out another appearance from the Stranger. Her ruse is successful, and the Stranger attacks Jenny and Drew in an alley. Drew is injured when an errant knife throw from Eliza hits him in the back. Jenny and Drew both get away and run into Jack, proving that he could not have been their attacker.
The Ghostwriter causes more strife at school when he publishes fake gossip that Jenny sends him. Eliza, posing as Jenny, begins a tentative friendship with Charlie Zaleska, one of Meghan’s friends. Jenny and Penny try to hunt down the suspect from the bar and they find him dead in his mobile home, courtesy of the Stranger. Using evidence from the suspect’s place, Jenny deduces that everyone’s timeline of Casey Klein’s murder is off. Drew, convalescing from the Stranger’s attack, begins dating Alicia Aaron.
Eliza uses her daredevil skills to break into a hotel room still rented under one of their dead father’s pseudonyms. In it, they find RJ’s briefcase, which contains more blackmail photos of him. They deduce from similar lens scratches that Jenny’s heirloom photo and these photos were taken with the same camera. They suspect that whoever this photographer was may have also been hired to run their mother off the road, days after they were born, killing Laura Onishi.
After a fight with Jenny over her growing frustration living in her shadow, and her mistrust of Dinah, Eliza takes off on her own. She visits Casey Klein’s mother for a mentor’s advice, only to realize, too late, that the mother is the serial killer. Jenny tracks down Eliza just in time and rescues her sister. In the fight, Eliza triggers a power lathe which strangles and decapitates Casey’s evil mother.
Eliza manages to hide before the police arrive, and Jenny is credited with solving another mystery and stopping a serial killer. However, Casey Klein’s mother was out of town when RJ was attacked. She couldn’t have been the Stranger. The sleazy reporter returns to blackmail Jenny but disappears after Jenny posts a photo of him on social media, assuming that the Stranger will take care of any interlopers to the game.
Needing a new clue to investigate, Jenny buys Alicia Aaron’s skeleton key. However, during a Valentine’s Day parade soon after, the Stranger confronts Jenny. He has poisoned Jack and Tori with daisy pollen, which they are both deadly allergic to. If Jenny doesn’t give up the skeleton key heirloom, they will both die. Jenny reluctantly hands it over, but the Stranger gives her only one EpiPen. An asphyxiating Tori uses the EpiPen on Jack to save him. Tori survives but falls into a coma.
Jenny hires a private investigator named Lambert to track down any PIs who were working in Blackbird Springs during the time of her parents’ affair. Eliza exposes the Ghostwriter, a teacher at their school, and grows closer to Charlie. Dinah breaks up with Jenny after she finds a tracker in her car (which Eliza, not Jenny, placed there). Dinah can’t cope with Jenny’s fractured personality anymore. Jenny tries to help Jack with his heirloom clue by shattering the Onyx Blackbird, but there’s no secret note inside like she suspected. Jack is furious with her.
Jenny and Eliza’s grandparents are finally home from a long trip to Okinawa. Jenny offers to let Eliza meet them first. As their Aunt Shelly is zipping up Eliza’s dress, she notices the lack of a scar Jenny has on her back. Shelly realizes that she’s seeing Eliza, not Jenny, and their secret is out. Eliza talks Shelly into keeping quiet about it for now. After they visit the grandparents, Jenny overhears Shelly commenting on Eliza being the perfect granddaughter, which preys on her insecurities. She runs away.
Six months pass with Jenny missing. Shelly has reluctantly kept up the charade, with Eliza posing as Jenny all the time. The strain is getting to her on a senior class trip to Europe. Dinah and Charlie are dating now, much to Eliza’s chagrin. Jack and Penny, who had been dating previously, have broken up. At the last minute, Drew’s father Arturo Porter joins the trip as a chaperone, after another teacher can’t make it due to a bike accident.
Eliza experiences an Adderall-fueled tour of Paris, Rome, and Venice, haunted by visions of Casey Klein’s mother, whom she decapitated. The second week of the class trip takes the students to a castle in Austria called Schloss Schwarzwald. Months ago, before she ran away, Jenny had bribed class president Thanh Tran to make the castle their last destination on the trip. At the castle, all is not as it seems. The folklore of Schloss Schwarzwald centers on a magical talisman in the shape of an onyx blackbird: Jack’s heirloom. Eliza realizes that Jenny forced the class trip to this castle for a purpose. When the maître d’ of the castle is murdered, and the tramline to civilization sabotaged, Eliza must solve the mystery in her sister’s stead.
Helping this time is Jack, who did find a note inside the heirloom Jenny smashed, and hid it from her. The note leads them to a series of diary entries hidden throughout the castle, that chronicle a young RJ Valentine’s visit to Schloss Schwarzwald, and his romance of the duchess who lived there. RJ was accompanied by two friends, who he named in pseudonym as Bruin and Isengrim.
In the present day, the quirks of the castle lead the students and guests to believe it is haunted. Strange screams, otherworldly mist, and even possible sightings of ghosts and the Stranger occur, though the culprit remains elusive. More guests at the hotel are found murdered, including Thanh’s boyfriend Lance Ashcroft. One prime suspect is the elderly Mrs. Yoshida, who disappears after seeming to attack one of their chaperones, Mr. White. Later, Eliza trips in the dark, falling unconscious, and awakens in a secret underground room. After ingesting tainted painkillers, she experiences horrific hallucinations, uncovers more secret passages, and eventually passes out after pursuing a mysterious wraith. When she awakens, another guest has been murdered.
In the diaries, they learn that RJ, whose given name wasn’t even RJ Valentine, was hired by the real RJ to pose as him at the castle. RJ falls in love with the duchess Mariel, whom he is supposed to be deceiving. She tells him that her bloodline is cursed, and leads him into a hidden chamber below the castle.
Eliza and Jack follow the diary’s directions to the hidden chamber, where they find another blackbird statue. They are interrupted by other guests from the castle, who reveal themselves to be a Hungarian gang of thieves hired to locate and steal the real blackbird statue. In the confrontation that ensues, the gang’s weapons all fail to fire, and many perish after drinking poisoned champagne. Eliza kills the last one, saving the rest of the students, though in doing so, she has finally deduced the source of so many oddities occurring at the castle. She goes to the duchess’s chambers, where she runs into both Dinah and Charlie. Eliza has had enough and demands Jenny show herself: she’s been there the whole time.
In her time away, Jenny has been living in hotels and traveling the world. Over the summer, she boards a cruise around the Sea of Japan where she becomes entwined with a sexy con artist named Nari del Reé. Jenny helps Nari foil some crypto goons, only to realize that Nari is using her to steal the crypto and a priceless red diamond ring herself. Jenny leaves the cruise determined to get back to her sleuthing ways, but can’t bring herself to face Eliza after all the time away. Instead, she poses as the elderly Mrs. Yoshida at Schloss Schwarzwald while the senior class arrives.
Working in the shadows, Jenny ferrets out the Hungarian thieves and disables their weapons. At one point, she witnesses Eliza trip and fall and takes her to her secret hiding place to care for her. Jenny leaves Eliza to rest and resumes her own identity to rejoin her classmates and investigate further. When Eliza wakes up and experiences her hallucinatory mania, Jenny has to avoid being seen by her twin. Eliza eventually collapses and Jenny realizes she’s experiencing a fentanyl overdose. Jenny saves Eliza just in time but must hide as her peers approach.
After the Hungarian thieves are thwarted, Eliza comes to the room Jenny is hiding in and outs her in front of Charlie and Dinah. Jenny confesses that she feared Eliza was “better” at being Trouble than she was, which is why she ran away. Eliza is furious, as is Dinah, after learning about all the twin shenanigans. Charlie and Eliza leave the mansion in the early morning to get help, because the mystery isn’t over. Even though the Hungarians were all killed, someone else has stolen the onyx blackbird, and another guest is dead. Jenny, having now fully assumed her identity again, works with Drew, Penny, and Jack to continue the mystery.
Jenny deduces that Bruin in the diaries is Mr. White. When she confronts him, he tells her that RJ must still be alive and that RJ is the Stranger. Then he is shot and killed by a crossbow bolt. Jenny and Drew go searching the grounds and find a bellhop dead, and a key to a room safe in his pocket. When they open the safe they find many stolen possessions, including the last diary entry.
They learn that the blackbird statue is nothing but a con, and not even an original, but a mass-produced copy. The duchess’s family tricked other nobles into buying the statues, each believing it was the authentic talisman and would bring them good luck. The duchess was murdered by the “real” RJ Valentine, who was there to steal the blackbird statue—only he wasn’t real either, he was a wealthy Hungarian who had killed the actual real RJ and assumed his identity. In the struggle that follows, Isengrim kills the Hungarian and he, RJ, and Bruin must hide until they can escape the castle.
Using their new information, Jenny reveals that another hotel employee, Sasha, is the dead bellhop’s brother, both of them being the offspring of the wealthy Hungarian. Mason arrives, having been called to Europe by Jenny previously, and warned by Eliza and Charlie, and helps stop Sasha from killing Jenny. A chase ensues and Sasha is electrocuted by one of the castle’s many devices designed to trigger special effects to sell the “haunted” reputation.
With the mystery seemingly solved, Jenny makes a final deduction: Isengrim wasn’t Declan Dillion, as Jack earlier suspected, he’s Drew’s father, Arty Porter. Arty has been acting under the Stranger’s orders the whole time and is about to leave with the statue when Jenny and Drew confront him at the broken tram station. Arty confesses to killing the Maître d’, the Hungarians, the bellhop, and Lance Ashcroft too (by mistake). He’s being blackmailed by the Stranger to stop Jenny and obtain the blackbird statue, or else his murder of the Hungarian will be revealed, and the Stranger will go after Drew and Drew’s mother.
Jenny lets Arty leave, knowing he’s a dead man walking because she caught him and revealed the Stranger’s plan. Drew is crushed by the revelation and can no longer participate in Jenny’s mystery games, it’s gotten too real for him. Everyone is enraged at Jenny for bringing them to this castle where Lance and Mr. White were killed. Eliza flies back to Blackbird Springs early with Charlie, who has a plan for how Eliza can live her own life without revealing her twin identity.
When Jenny returns to the States, she finds she’s gained a new “cousin” from Okinawa named Kazumi. It’s Eliza under heavy makeup and styling, courtesy of Charlie. Jenny learns that while she was away, Tori woke up from the coma and provided an alibi for Val the night of RJ’s attack. Additionally, the blood on the murder weapon they found in Val’s purse was proven to be tainted. The judge has thrown Val’s case out, making Jenny’s solution to the mystery void. Mr. Webb tells her that the Valentine fortune will revert to escrow and that there is a contingency plan for a false solution such as this. Jenny will have to wait to find out, though. Lockhart is arresting her for evidence tampering, and Jenny is going to jail, much to Aunt Shelly and Eliza’s approval.
And that, friends, is where we find our hero as Game On, Trouble begins:
Jenny Valentine is out of money, out of friends, and out of second chances…