Line #1 YMMV/SammyKeyes


1	* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation:
2	** Again Heather. Is she really just a spiteful, manipulative brat or is she an emotionally damaged girl desperate for the attention and approval of her family and peers. Sammy can't seem to figure her out.
3	** Sammy can be viewed as either a plucky amateur sleuth, or a nosy girl who causes trouble for all her friends.
4	%%* DracoInLeatherPants: Heather seems to have shades of this for most fans, especially in later books.
5	* GrowingTheBeard: The series was good to begin with, but as time has gone on, the books have combined episodic mystery with arc-based character drama, thoroughly averting StatusQuoIsGod. The exact turning point was ''The Runaway Elf'' where Sammy comforts a little girl [[spoiler:who lost her father, forgives Mrs. Graybill before the lady dies, and mends ties with Officer Borsch by giving him information on a DirtyCop]].
6	* NightmareFuel:
7	** ''Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy''
8	*** When she and Marissa go to visit Lady Lana and confront her for turning her life into a lie, Lana trades rooms with Le Brandi, a fellow actress, to get extra beds for the girls. Sammy wakes up and hears thumping; the next day, they find out Le Brandi is dead in her room, blue cheeks and all. Worse, the autopsy reveals she was suffocated, meaning Sammy heard a ''murder'' happen just next door and didn't realize.
9	*** At first Sammy wonders if her mother was the killer, but slowly comes to the conclusion that ''Lana'' was the actual target. [[spoiler:She finds out Max's wife Claire died the same day of Lana's fake birthday, twenty-five years ago. He also believes in reincarnation and has terminal cancer. Sammy goes OhCrap as she pieces together that Max is dying and wants to reincarnate with "Claire," so he strangled Le Brandi mistaking her for Lana in the dark. Since Lana is alive, that means he's going to try again soon. It's why he ordered Sammy and Marissa locked up, since they were watching over Lana and knew Opal wasn't the killer]].
10	*** When we realizes Max is out of his mind: [[spoiler:Sammy sees Lana trying to tell him the truth about her life. Max doesn't listen and poisons their drinks at a gala. Sammy, on seeing her mother collapse, quickly grabs salty coffee and uses it to make her mother throw up the poisoned alcohol, while Max is rambling about how destiny can't be stopped as he's dying from the same poison. While Sammy wonders if she should have saved Max, his daughter tells Sammy that it was no big loss]].
11	** And in ''Dead Giveaway'', it turns out that [[spoiler:the abusive husband has been dead for a while, and his wife has been posing as him and hiding his body in her compost pile.]]
12	* StoicWoobie: Good Lord, Holly. Her parents are dead, she's lived in eight abusive foster homes, and when Sammy finds her, she's living in a cardboard refrigerator box down by the river.
13	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodCharacter:
14	As nice as Sammy and Borsch's gradually developed relationship was, it is kind of a shame that Borsch’s respective partners in the first two books (Jacobsen and Muscles) both disappeared after they were nicer and more open-minded from the start.
15	** Taylor Briggs vanishes from the series after ''The Curse of Moustache Mary'' despite his role as a BigJerkOnCampus ImpliedLoveInterest to AlphaBitch Heather, a friend of Casey who inadvertently brought him and Sammy together, and the brother of two characters who got in trouble with the law in that book, all of which could have given him the potential to develop as a character or become TheFriendNobodyLikes.
16	** The Murdocks from ''The Curse of Moustache Mary'' only make a couple of cameo appearances to set them up as {{Red Herring}}s. Their perspective of being FeudingFamilies with the Huntleys is only briefly touched on, with their potential to shed old hatred after reading an apology letter their late patriarch wrote Lucinda Huntley also going unmentioned.

Context YMMV / SammyKeyes