The Lily Adventures

I just recently read the first two books in The Lily Adventures series by Lois Gladys Leppard. Both Secret Money and Suspicious Identity are pretty slow paced until the end, which goes by much too fast. The resolutions of both books occur in the last few pages and leave little room for explanation. I like the ideas of the two plots, but they are not well developed. There are two more books in the series, Accidental Dreams and Mysterious Revelations, but the library system doesn't have them. Alas, I may never know how the mystery turns out. It seems to me that Mrs. Leppard could have combined the books into one because the overarching mystery is left unsolved. I would prefer a more compact, better edited version.

The books focus on the mystery surrounding the death of Lily Masterson's father. In Secret Money, Lily receives an urgent message telling her to return home to her ailing father. When she arrives, she is told that her father was killed a few weeks earlier in a horseshoeing accident. However, the death does not appear to be an accident at all. In Suspicious Identity, Lily is now living in her Aunt Janie Belle's house because her property was foreclosed. She discovers an old letter from her mother to her father telling of valuable jewelry. The jewelry is found when she sneaks into her old house to look for it. The mystery of her father's death is yet unsolved.