Nancy Drew, nineteen, blond-white washed hair, streaked pink, sat in the artists chair in the tattoo parlour down on Church Street. The work was being done around her wrist, a black design of Celtic knots that she had designed herself, and which was her second piece of ink. The artist, a huge, bear shaped gay man covered in colourful skulls and cowboys, and who had introduced himself as V., was hunched over her wrist, the needle leaving a faint burning sensation through her skin.

"The Jesus and Mary Chain's Stoned and Dethroned album," Nancy said, flicking her tongue stud against her teeth. "I love that."

"No taste," V. replied. "No taste in you kids."

"It's the natural successor to Darklands."

"Why don't you just stab my eardrums out?"

Later in the day, Nancy would find his body in the alley of the bookshop she worked in, beaten swollen and discoloured, his crusted with blood and turned black: dead, so very dead, like the countless others she had found littering the path of her life. She would sigh when she found him, and remember that he had been very gentle with the needle. But that was six hours from now.

"Nancy Drew, the fictional teen sleuth popularized in mystery novels for eight decades, is about to get a heavy dose of 21st-century hipness and relevancy.

In four new paperbacks due in March, Nancy is finished with high school. She tools around River Heights in an environmentally friendly, gas/electric hybrid car. She uses computers to solve detective work. And she tells her crime-fighting tales in first person."

just what the world needs, huh?