Sweet Valley Diaries: Super Thriller 1: Double Jeopardy

Just then, the man stopped to hoist the load up, as if to get a better grip. Part of the green blanket fell back as he shifted the weight, and Jessica felt her heart–almost literally–stand still. A woman’s arm was clearly visible, hanging limply out from underneath the blanket. – p. 60

If you remember the later years of the Sweet Valley High series — or even if you've ever perused the list of book titles — you know that, at some point, things in Sweet Valley get nuts. Instead of semi-annual kidnappings and occasional deaths, these later books offer non-stop action, murderers, the infamous evil twins, and these Fear-Street-style plotlines sometimes span several volumes. Looking back, it's hard to pinpoint a single book that marks this shift into Crazytown. One candidate is Double Jeopardy, the first Sweet Valley "Super Thriller."

This first Thriller occurs during Sweet Valley's "Impossible Summer," which is what I like to call the time during all summer-edition SVH books that is somehow both before AND after the girls' junior year. Liz has already met Jeffrey (who's away as a counselor at a summer camp), but somehow everyone's going to go right back to junior year as soon as this volume's over. So, other than existing within a rift in the space/time continuum, what's so thrilling about this book? It still features a boy-crazy Jessica, precocious bordering on sociopathic. Elizabeth is still focused and annoyingly levelheaded. But this time, there's a murderer.

The mere presence of a murderer isn't thrilling enough for you? Wait, there's more! The murderer has killed the girlfriend of one of Steven Wakefield's buddies, Adam, who happens to be staying with the Wakefields for the summer. He then put the body in the trunk of Adam's car, so everyone thinks Adam's a murderer! The one person in Sweet Valley who knows the truth is Jessica: she actually saw the murderer carrying his victim's dead body through a parking lot. But no one believes Jessica's story, because she's been lying her ass off to impress some boy, a reporter for the local paper no less! AND the murderer knows Jessica saw him, so he's probably going to come after her, too!

That thrilling enough for ya?

Jessica has to do all she can to convince the police that Adam's innocent, and that there's a real killer on the loose. As I mentioned earlier, some pathological lying on Jessica's part is causing something of a roadblock. Here are the primary lies she tells at the book's outset:

1. She tells the hot Sweet Valley Times reporter that there was foul play in a recent fire at the Dairi Burger. Assuring him that there's something to this story, they go check it out. The owner is totally baffled, as it was a very straightforward grease fire.

2. She tells the same reporter that her neighbor is a murderer. For some reason, he writes a story about it and turns it in to his editor. He nearly gets fired for irresponsible journalism.

3. Because she thinks relationships are boring, she want Liz to forget about Jeffrey and fall in love with Adam. She writes a love letter to Jessica, pretending it's from Adam. In it, "he" professes his displeasure with his girlfriend. This causes a bit of a snafu when Adam's girlfriend is suddenly dead, and Liz feels she has no choice but to turn in her evidence against him — namely, the letter she believes he wrote to her. Oops.

Damn, Jess! That's a lot of lying, even for you! But she's able to gradually convince them she's in earnest about the whole murderer thing. Primarily she does this by exhibiting an air of hysteria and terror. After all, now the murderer is probably after HER., the one person Jessica actually cares about.

I won't tell you how it all ends up. Suffice it to say, everybody dies.