THE BLUEBERRY COLLECTION

The September after 13-year-old Bessie Hightower's summer in France, described in The French Detection (1979), her publisher father's guest professorship at Princeton brings the family from Delight, Texas, where organized crime apparently does not exist, to Blueberry, New Jersey--where, as Waldron tells it, the main-street shop owners who deal in numbers give you bad looks if you try to buy the cokes or newspapers they sell as a cover. Bessie is determined to catch out the racket's bag person and banker, and does in the end--though she and readers are thrown off track for most of the story by the seemingly suspicious behavior of a nice old lady who is guilty of selling a forged painting. Most of Waldron's readers won't notice that she has the numbers scene a little out of focus, but the idea of Bessie bringing the mob boss to justice is ludicrous. Beyond that, this transplanted provincial comes off as more a busybody than a heroine.