The brothers experience new technology in the making.......and in the breaking! (The Hardy Boys: Program for Destruction - Franklin W. Dixon)

Member Name: pmcds

Product:	The Hardy Boys: Program for Destruction - Franklin W. Dixon
Date:	09/05/09 (61 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good plot building and increasing tension

Disadvantages: Poor characterisation on the whole

Program For Destruction is the 87th Hardy Boys book, and it follows on suit from the previous few books which dealt with the ever developing world of technology. In this story, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, sons of supersleuth Fenton Hardy, get involved with computer-operated vehicles.

It seems that there are a number of suspicious goings on around the company that manufacture the vehicles, with accidents and technical malfunctions threatening to put the company out of business. Frank and Joe are asked to investigate, and soon discover a cutthroat world where the race to be the most technologically advanced holds no prisoners.

For those of you who are unaware, the Hardy Boys are a pair of All-American brothers, aged 18 and 17 respectively, and have been since the 1920s, when the first book came out! In keeping their ages the same throughout the books, the target audience of teenage boys is covered every time.

The books are all published under the pseudonym Franklin W Dixon, but are actually written by a number of different ghost writers. Each adventure sees the common occurrence of the brothers investigating a mystery, whether it turns out to be a local woman with a seemingly haunted house, or a trip in a space rocket to stop saboteurs, or even thwarting an international crime ring or some murderers along the way!

Quite often, the stories are founded on unlikely events, where it's hard to imagine a pair of teenage boys being asked to stop an international crime ring, for example! However, this book and the few around it seem to have gone with more contemporary themes at the time, with the space race and high-level technology playing a big part, with small companies with geniuses at work finding curious events occurring. In this adventure, the plot slowly gathers steam, building the tension and increasing the danger as it goes, making it all the more believable that it would be the Hardys investigating it.

Characterisation is usually sparse, and this book is no exception. If you want the full extent of the Hardy Boys and their friends and to feel like you really know them, then there is a plethora of books where they are briefly described, but hardly any where anyone has gone into great detail. The characters individual to this book are quite well described, though, and it makes it an enjoyable read.

Overall, this is an enjoyable and somewhat believable book. As with most of the Hardy Boys books published int he 1980s, it's hard to get a hold of in the UK, but can be bought from amazon.com for a fair price. Just mind the P&P costs! A recommended read, but don't expect anything special.

Summary: A nothing special book number 87 for the Hardy Boys