History Recap / HardyBoysCaseFiles11BrotjerAgainstBrother

'''End of Book 10 summary''': On a rescue mission in the Colorado Rockies, Frank Hardy meets his most dangerous opponent--Joe Hardy!

Joe disappeared while trying to deliver a warning to a federal witness. Frank heads west, fearful that his brother has lost his life. Instead, Joe has lost his memory. All he knows is that a hitman is after him--and he thinks Frank is the paid killer. With the help of Rita, his beautiful rescuer, Joe is ready to nail Frank. But doing that might put him in the sights of the real killer.

Can Frank convince Joe that he's really one of the good guys? Or will Joe make a fatal mistake?

'''Back cover summary''': A federal witness is being hunted by an unknown hit man. In an effort to warn the witness, Fenton Hardy sends Joe on a secret mission. With frightening swiftness the killer manages to ambush Joe before he can deliver his message. Joe manages to survive but loses his memory!

Joe can't remember his name or his mission. Worst of all, he thinks Frank is the enemy. Meanwhile a deadly killer lies in wait--selling death on the family plan.
! Tropes found here are:
* AmnesiacHero: When Joe is pushed over the the cliff in the trunk of a car by the BigBad, he suffers a head trauma so bad that it makes him forget [[NameAmnesia his name]], his mission, and everyone in his life, save for some bursts of WistfulAmnesia, and worst of all, [[FakeMemories warps his memories of Frank]]. He only recovers from it at the climax thanks to the shock of a nearby explosion and Frank showing up to rescue him and Rita.
** AmnesiacDissonance: Because his head trauma gives Joe some FakeMemories, he spends the majority of the book mistakenly believing that his brother Frank--the person he's closest to and cares most about in the world--is the ProfessionalKiller trying to murder him and Rita, and violently attacks him several times.
** AmnesiacResonance: And yet, despite the above, Joe gets several memory flashes of moments with Frank from previous books--wherein they worked together against one of their foes, or Joe was upset about him being hurt--that make him question his conviction that Frank is trying to hurt them, and become confused.
* BigBrotherInstinct: Frank always has this for Joe, of course, but it's on display more than ever here. He's worried sick when Joe disappears on his mission and goes after him to save him from the hitman, all the while deeply fearing that he's too late. Despite being upset when an amnesiac Joe attacks him under the mistaken belief that he's the hitman, Frank never stops trying to protect him, eventually figures out about the amnesia, and even breaks the law several times to try to get to Joe before the hitman does, before finally succeeding in rescuing him and Rita right before Skell can kill them.
* BigDamnHeroes: Frank finally catches up to Joe and Rita, only to find that the hitman has captured them and is preparing to murder them. He uses an explosion to distract the killer and draw him from the room long enough to sneak in and unlock their cells (even if he only manages to free Joe before Skell returns). This is also when Joe's memories finally return.
* ContinuityNod:
** The book starts out with Joe having a nightmare about the climax of the previous book, "Hostages of Hate", except that it has an EverybodyDies DownerEnding instead of the real one where they successfully beat the terrorists.
** Joe's fragmented memories from after he gets amnesia contain snippets of adventures from previous books, including "Dead on Target", "Evil, Inc.", "Cult of Crime", and "Deathgame".
* DramaticIrony:
** We, of course, know what Frank's and Joe's names are, and the narration continues referring to them as such. However, thanks to Joe's amnesia, he doesn't remember his own name--nor Frank's, whom he refers to as "the dark-haired guy"--until the climax. Likewise, despite Rita spending most of the book being protected by Joe and fearing Frank as a possible enemy, she doesn't get to learn his name until the ending, when Frank introduces them both.
** Thanks to Joe's head injury, he misremembers Iola being killed by the car bomb as her being surrounded by flames and that Frank stopped him from saving her, which causes him to spend most of the book thinking his brother is the enemy, up to and including attacking him a few times because he fears Frank will try to hurt him and Rita. Frank and the reader know that Frank stopping Joe was to prevent him from dying in the fire from the bomb (not to mention Iola was already dead and couldn't be saved anyway) and he's really trying to protect him from the ProfessionalKiller after them.
** Frank, who last saw Joe entering the cabin with Rita and then sees it get blown up by the hitman soon after, spends some time thinking Joe is dead before failing to find his or Rita's remains in the wreckage and realizing they must have survived, while we've already seen that the two of them escaped the cabin beforehand and watched it explode from a distance.
* EvilRedhead: The contract killer, Skell, has red hair and is completely remorseless about all the murders he's killed, even gloating to Rita about having murdered her father and how he's going to kill her and Joe too.
* FakeMemories: Joe's memories of Frank become warped thanks to his amnesia-inducing head trauma, and it causes him to misremember the beginning of the first book in the ''Casefiles''--where Frank had to knock Joe out to stop him from running into a fire after a bomb explosion--as Frank stopping him from saving Iola. This is a big part of the reason he spends most of the book thinking his older brother is the enemy who's trying to kill him.
* FightingYourFriend: Or rather, your brother who's ''also'' your best friend. The amnesiac Joe attacks Frank several times under the mistaken belief that the latter is the hitman who's after him and Rita, including directly fighting him several times. Since he's fighting for his life (or so he thinks) while Frank, of course, doesn't want to hurt him and is holding back, Joe wins their multiple fights and knocks him out.
* HesBack: Frank showing up JustInTime to rescue Rita and Joe before Skell kills them--while drawing the killer away long enough to set Joe free--is what finally causes Joe to get his memories back and remember who Frank is, with perfect timing for the two of them to team up and fight Skell together.
* IHaveYourWife: In the backstory, the mobsters against whom Mark Tabor was testifying kidnapped his wife (Rita's mom) to stop him from going on the stand. Mark hired a PI who found out that they'd unfortunately already murdered her, and went ahead with his testimony.
* LastStand: "Uncle Delbert"--actually Rita's father--decides to make one of these (with their dog by his side) against the hitman to protect his daughter after entrusting her to Joe's care. It helps that he's SecretlyDying and not long for this world anyway. He and the dog are killed soon after when the killer blows up the cabin.
* MadeOfIron: Skell ambushes Joe, locks him in the trunk of his own rental car, and pushes it over the edge of a cliff to kill him. Joe survives with nothing worse than head trauma that causes LaserGuidedAmnesia, which he recovers from by the end of the book.
* TheMole: Rita's father, Mark, a construction company owner, was approached by the mob with a scheme to defraud the government out of millions of dollars. Mark pretended to agree, but immediately reported it to the authorities and secretly gathered evidence against the criminals until he had enough to get them arrested, acting as the star witness in court to get them convicted. Unfortunately, this got his wife killed, and he and Rita had to go into WitnessProtection.
* NameAmnesia: One of the many things Joe forgets because of his head injury is his own name, along with the names of everyone else in his life.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Skell, the hitman, tries to kill Joe, but the latter survives and sees Rita, and because he's injured and begs for help, she brings him back to her cabin. As Skell boasts to them later, this is how he found their exact hiding place, and Joe feels terrible that he was supposed to warn Rita and her father only to accidentally lead the killer right to them. Rita, though, assures him that it's not his fault and she knows he was trying to help.
* PluckyGirl: Rita is an ActionSurvivor who powers through her parents' deaths and the hitman's numerous attempts to kill her so she can survive as a witness to bring the mobsters responsible to justice. She manages to lessen Joe's amnesia-induced SanitySlippage (even stopping him from killing Frank at one point) despite not even knowing his name. During the climax, despite being captured and locked in a jail cell by Skell, she remains a DefiantCaptive and helps the Hardys fight him as much as she can, such as pushing Joe back into the fight when he falls against her cell door, and stealing Skell's gun through the bars when he gets too close.
* ProfessionalKiller: Skell, who was hired to kill Rita and her dad, is apparently one of the best. While he does succeed in killing Mark, his primary target, he fails to kill Rita thanks to the Hardy Boys' interference, and is defeated and arrested in the end.
-->'''Skell''': My employers knew when they hired me that the job was guaranteed.
* RedHerring: Joe is a little suspicious of the overly-friendly stranger sitting next to him on the plane at the beginning, but so far as we can tell, though, he has no involvement in the plot at all and is exactly who he seems to be.
* SanitySlippage: Caused by Joe's amnesia, where he's repeatedly plagued by vague, half-formed memories of his life, and gradually grows more confused and frenzied by his conflicting memories of Frank. Thankfully, once he regains them, this goes away.
* SecretlyDying: Mark's reason for refusing to join Joe and Rita in escaping from the safehouse before the hired killer gets there. He learned months ago that he has a terminal illness and doesn't have long to live anyway, so he chooses to make a LastStand to give the kids a better chance of escaping.
* SiblingMurder: Narrowly averted, but almost a tragic, accidental version. Joe's head trauma-induced FakeMemories cause him to misremember Frank as an enemy and think that he's the hired killer after them, and attacks him multiple times in what Joe perceives as self-defense. One time, he tries to push a giant boulder onto Frank, and another, after beating him in a fight and knocking him unconscious, Joe almost finishes him off before Rita stops him.
* SkinnyDipping: Rita is doing this when Joe initially encounters her after the hitman's murder attempt. It avoids NakedFirstImpression, though, because she covers herself up with a towel when she sees him, and he's too delirious from his head injury to notice much, anyway. He only finds out this was the case when she tells him so later.
* SoleSurvivor: Rita's mom was murdered by the mob in retaliation for her dad bringing them down, and said dad and their dog are killed by Skell, leaving Rita as the only member of the family still alive by the end. She re-enters WitnessProtection to be able to testify against the criminals again someday.
* SpottingTheThread: How Frank eventually figures out that Joe has amnesia. When they fought, his brother was seriously trying to hurt him and acted like he didn't know him, and Frank realizes that the enemy must have done something to make Joe think he's the hitman. He remembers that, when he first saw Joe, he mistook him for a guy in a turban, understands that the "turban" was actually head bandages, and from there, it dawns on him that Joe suffered head trauma and now has amnesia.
* WistfulAmnesia: Joe, who was on a mission to deliver a message to Mark and Rita Tabor in witness protection, forgets the finer details about this once he loses his memory; however, he does still retain the sense that he had something important to do, and is able to deliver the message anyway when they find it on his person. He also gets flashes of the faces of other important people in his life, such as his parents, some of his friends, and most prominently, Iola. Interestingly, he also does recall that he has a brother; he just doesn't remember that "the dark-haired guy" pursuing them ''is'' that brother until the climax of the book.
* WitnessProtection: Mark Tabor gathered evidence against the mob and got them convicted and send to prison, but they appeal and get a new trial on a technicality. They hire a hitman to murder the Tabors, knowing that, if they could kill off the family (all of whom could testify against them), the case would fall apart without their star witnesses and they'd get to go free. They succeeded in murdering Mark's wife/Rita's mother, and the two of them had to go into witness protection to avoid a similar fate. When Joe first meets them, Mark is pretending to be Rita's "Uncle Delbert".
** WitlessProtectionProgram: The plot of the book kicks off because the gangsters have discovered the general vicinity of where the Tabors are hiding and sends a ProfessionalKiller after them, and Joe is sent to warn them about this so they can escape to a new hiding place. Unfortunately, partially thanks to Skell attacking Joe and giving him amnesia and the Tabors finding him and taking him in, this is what leads Skell to them, and he manages to kill Mark and their dog, Lucky.
** By the end, Rita, the SoleSurvivor of the family, re-enters witness protection so she can someday testify against the mob again once they get another trial, and adopts a new, unknown alias.

* BigBrotherInstinct

* HesBack

* SpottingTheThread: How Frank eventually figures out that Joe has amnesia.
* WistfulAmnesia: Joe, who was on a mission to deliver a message to Mark and Rita Tabor in witness protection, forgets the finer details about this once he loses his memory; however, he does still retain the sense that he had something important to do, and is able to deliver the message anyway when they find it on his person. He also gets flashes of the faces of other important people in his life, such as his parents, some of his friends, and most prominently, Iola.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero:
* PluckyGirl:

* WitnessProtection: After Mark Tabor gathered evidence against the mob and got them convicted, they appealed the sentence, knowing that, if they could kill off all of the Tabors who could testify against them, the case would fall apart without their star witnesses and they'd get to go free. They succeeded in murdering Mark's wife/Rita's mother, and the two of them had to go into witness protection to avoid a similar fate. When Joe first meets them, Mark is pretending to be Rita's "Uncle Delbert".

* TheMole: Rita's father, Mark, was approached by the mob

* SpottingTheThread:

* WitnessProtection