on the case when the girls fail to return. Crime noir elements feature heavily in this book, and Ned Nickerson is prominently featured as a true partner in crime solving. Nancy is accosted by a woman in the opening chapters, comes face to face with a thief at a wedding reception, and is nearly suffocated when a pair of thieves wrap her face-down in a bedspread. George Fayne is drugged and a victim of criminal threat, and Ned is involved in two physical confrontations as well. Finally, Nancy and Bess are kidnapped, blindfolded, and abused verbally (this refers to an out-of-print version of the story). 1969 revision Nancy's haircolor is changed to titian, George's from black to brown, and the story eliminates subplots and extraneous descriptive vocabulary, including non-essential scenes and passages, including descriptive and humorous passages where Nancy works undercover as a file clerk and finds the work unappealing. Additionally, the revised version removes questionable (in 1969) descriptive elements of George's drugged status and hypodermics. Strangely, the revision also eliminates the importance of George's recovery; although she leads investigators to the scene of the kidnapping, Mr. Drew is nearly as instrumental in finding Nancy as George. Her discovery of a dress button Nancy has planted at the scene is downplayed. In the original version, Nancy has changed clothes, so only George knows what Nancy and Bess were wearing when they disappeared. Other editions This book was the first promotional release for the 1959 debut of the Nancy Drew Reader's Club. The covers of volumes released in this group are two-toned pastels, featuring full color jackets and frontispieces, as well as eight double-page drawings by artist Polly Bolian. Bolian depicts Nancy as a strawberry-blond, but with the short tousled "Audrey Hepburn" hairstyle worn by many young women at the time, and tailored, preppy 1950s ensembles. These editions had internal references to other volumes removed, and contain no clues of sequencing. Bolian adapts, with less action, the same scene as the original frontispiece, for the cover art; Nancy and Bess, in vivid 1950's shirtwaist dresses, spy on Mr. Tombar from a ruined garden. Artwork The original volume was published in 1953, and was the first book to feature cover art by the artist Rudy Nappi. Nappi would go on to illustrate the covers of many Hardy Boys and all of the Nancy Drew series from 1953 to 1979. During his long