Return to Planet Digby in Trouble Makes a Comeback

And everyone has changed a bit. Zoe’s restless mother has found new love with Cooper, the sensitive yet dogged police officer. Power couple Sloane and Henry have lost some of their social cachet in the wake of the first novel’s antics—kidnappings, drug busts, explosions, that kiss, you remember. Digby, meanwhile, has been absent from River Heights, pursuing his erratic crusade for the truth behind his sister’s disappearance.
As for Zoe, Digby’s erstwhile Watson, she has managed, largely, to compartmentalize Digby’s goodbye kiss by doing what she has longed to do for several hundred pages: be normal. She has a new football star boyfriend, Austin, and new sleepover-having, hair-highlighting friends. She has even got a part-time job, one that fills the void of her previous hobbies: car chases and late-night break-ins.
But old habits die hard, and when Digby returns after months away, Zoe realizes just how much she has missed the chaos—and the danger. In a nonfictional teenager, this behavior would be worrisome, but with this pair, it’s welcome quip-bait. “Do you think I have some kind of post-traumatic thing? Where I’m like, numb to danger or something?” Zoe asks Digby. “We’re millennials, Princeton. We’re all post-traumatic,” he replies.
As is custom, there’s plenty of trauma in store for these two and their motley crew of pseudo-detectives (including, thankfully, boy wonder Felix). The guiding light through all of these capers is, of course, the quest to learn the truth about Sally Digby’s disappearance. That hunt for answers will lead Digby and an alternately willing and unwilling Zoe into various dens of iniquity, as did their first adventure. This time, however, while the pair lock horns with a reclusive billionaire, they’re also working through awkward relationship feelings, too.

In Digby’s absence, Zoe made a perfectly respectable life for herself with a jock boyfriend, an efficient SAT study plan, and her eyes set firmly on the Princeton prize. His return complicates a few things, not least of which is the also-budding romance between him and moon-eyed Bill.
The will-they, won’t-they set-up is well-trod ground, of course, but it gets fresh life in Trouble Makes a Comeback. Why? Because it hangs on characters who are endlessly entertaining.
Zoe balances the prototypical snarky heroine role with genuine emotional vulnerability. Her continuing struggle with her controlling, self-projecting father, and coming to terms with a well-meaning mother who may be just a tad too much like her, give Zoe’s character great depth. Meanwhile, Digby continues to be the modern Sherlock Holmes we never knew we needed: a brilliant and infuriating vigilante gumshoe who is utterly, annoyingly charismatic. But even Digby has darker depths, explored more fully and soberly here than in Trouble Is a Friend of Mine.
All of this comes together to ensure Trouble Makes a Comeback is a clever, breezy continuation of one of the genre’s most entertaining new series. We can only hope things keep blowing up in River Heights, and that Zoe and Digby will always be there, with sparks flying.