I remember reading this book once years ago, and I don't know if this was before I had read any of the books in the series or not, and I remembered really liking it. I had read a couple of the Encyclopedia Brown books, so this was just a different version of one of those. Rereading it once I was older, I found that it actually holds up pretty well. I was afraid that the mysteries would be too easy for me, but I thought that it was at a pretty good level. Some of them were relatively easy, but others were much more difficult and required you to really look at the details. This is a solid book, and I really like how fun and enjoyable the book is. You don't even have to be a Lemony Snicket fan, you just get to kick back and try to find the solution to a couple of funny mysteries.

I've talked about in my reviews of "Who Could That Be at This Hour" and "When Did You See Her Last" how I've been curious to learn more about Stain'd-by-the-Sea and its residents, and I really liked how we got to take little glimpses into the lives of some of these people. Even though I'm sure that the new characters won't have any importance in the future, I still really enjoyed learning about them and seeing what life in the town is like. Stain'd-by-the-Sea is brimming with mysteries and secrets, and even if it isn't related to the overall mystery of the series, its still cool none-the-less. I wish there was about five more books just like this so we can learn even more about the town.

I will say that there were a couple of times that the writing and grammar didn't really make sense. There was one line (I forgot to write it down before returning the book, but you'll just have to take my word for this) that made no sense at all. It was complete gibberish, and even after reading it several times I still didn't understand what it meant. It was almost like two sentences were squashed together, but instead of being a run on, they words were interwoven. I can't even try to write an example of what I'm talking about, but just believe me when I say I was surprised that the editor left it in. In fact, I'm not even sure this book had an editor. After poking around, I did find some more quotes from the book that clearly weren't edited. I don't know if Snicket was going for a certain "vibe" with the writing, but they could have been written a bit better. 

Another moment in the book where the writing and grammar were particularly appalling was in the chapter "Ransom Note" while Lemony was at the mechanics with Jackie. Snicket didn't use any pronouns for Jackie, which meant that every time they spoke, he ended their dialogue with "Jackie said." It got SO ANNOYING after the phrase "Jackie said" was used ten billion times with absolutely no variation. some people might say that I'm just being picky, but for some reason that bugged me so much.

There's not that much for me to say about this book, because even with its flaws, I still thought it was pretty solid. Even though it didn't add anything new to the table or expand almost anything from the series, I still thought it was fun. Sometimes its good to take a break and just enjoy something short and sweet like this book. I really like mini-mysteries and other stuff like this that, as a reader, I get to feels as if I had a hand in solving. I really wish Snicket wrote more books like this, because I would read them so quickly. I wouldn't say that this book was super stellar and rose above all other books, but it didn't need to be that way nor was Snicket trying to make it that way. It was simply its own thing, and I loved it for that.