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:
- Amnesiac Dissonance: Because his head trauma gives Joe some Fake Memories, he spends the majority of the book mistakenly believing that his brother Frank—the person he's closest to and cares about most in the world—is the Professional Killer trying to murder him and Rita, and violently attacks him several times.
- Amnesiac Hero: When Joe is pushed over a cliff in the trunk of his car by the Big Bad, he suffers a head trauma so bad that it makes him forget his name, his mission, and everyone in his life, save for some bursts of Wistful Amnesia, and worst of all, warps his memories of Frank. He only recovers from it at the climax thanks to almost being killed and Frank showing up to rescue him and Rita.
- Amnesiac Resonance: Despite the above-mentioned Amnesiac Dissonance, Joe gets several memory flashes of moments with Frank from previous books—wherein they worked together against their foes, or Joe was upset about him being hurt—that make him question his conviction that Frank is trying to kill them, and become confused. And besides his Sanity Slippage and heightened paranoia, he otherwise retains his personality, sense of justice, and desire to help people in need, and protects Rita with his life throughout their journey.
- Big Brother Instinct: 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.
- Big Damn Heroes: 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 comes back). This is also when Joe's memories return at last.
- Continuity Nod:
- The story starts out with Joe having a nightmare about the climax of the previous book, "Hostages of Hate", except that it has an Everybody Dies Downer Ending 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".
- Dramatic Irony:
- 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 either of their names 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 him stopping Joe back then 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 Professional Killer 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.
- Evil Gloating: Skell indulges in this when he's captured Joe and Rita, telling them about how, with Rita and her father dead, the people who hired him to kill them will be able to dodge their prison sentence, and noting that killing Joe too will have to be "a freebie". True to form, doing this instead of just killing them quickly and leaving gives Frank time to catch up to them and stage a rescue.
- Evil Redhead: The contract killer, Skell, has red hair and is completely remorseless about all the murders he's committed, even gloating to Rita about having murdered her father and how he's going to kill her and Joe too.
- Fake Memories: Joe's memories of Frank become warped thanks to his amnesia-inducing head trauma, and it causes him to misremember the beginning of "Dead on Target"—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.
- Fighting Your Friend: 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 more than once. 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.
- Foreshadowing: Frank reflects near the beginning while out on a jog about how good of a Sibling Team he and Joe are because of their complementary skills, and thinks to himself that he'd hate to see what would happen if they were ever on opposite sides. Guess what happens for most of the story.
- Get It Over With: Joe says this word-for-word after Skell takes him and Rita prisoner and subjects them to his Evil Gloating. In true villain fashion, he just says "I'm in no hurry" and continues to gloat, giving Frank enough time to arrive and come up with a plan to stop him.
- He's Back!: When Frank shows up Just in Time to rescue Rita and Joe before Skell kills them—while drawing the killer away long enough to free Joe—he finally gets his memories back and remembers who Frank is, with perfect timing for the two of them to team up and fight Skell together.
- Hey, You!: Justified with Rita towards Joe; she does ask him for his name not long after meeting him, but since Joe himself doesn't remember his own name thanks to his amnesia and can't tell her what it is, she spends most of the book addressing him without it. Once his memories are restored, she meets Frank, and he gives her both of their names, she does call him "Joe" once in the denouement.
- I Have Your Wife: 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.
- Idiot Ball: Downplayed, but once Joe has lost his memories, during his numerous encounters with Frank where he believes him to be the enemy, Frank never addresses him by name at any point (despite both of them usually making frequent use of Say My Name), even after figuring out that Joe has amnesia. You'd think it would occur to Frank that, if he knew Joe's name and used it, his brother might stop and listen to him and realize they're on the same side, but doesn't attempt it at all, and it takes until the climax of the book, when Frank shows up to save him and Rita, for Joe to remember him.
- Last Stand: "Uncle Delbert"—actually Rita's father—decides to make one of these (with their dog, Lucky, by his side) against the hitman to protect his daughter after entrusting her to Joe's care. It helps that he's Secretly Dying and not long for this world anyway. He and Lucky are killed soon after when the killer blows up the cabin.
- Made of Iron: 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 Laser-Guided Amnesia, which he recovers from by the end of the book.
- The Mole: 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 for the cops to arrest them, 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 Witness Protection.
- Name Amnesia: 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. Unlike many examples, he doesn't choose a different name or any kind of alternate alias to go by, and his companion, Rita, just utilizes Hey, You! to talk to him until he remembers his name at the end.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: 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, however, is quick to assure him that it's not his fault and she knows he was trying to help.
- Plucky Girl: Rita 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 Sanity Slippage (even stopping him from killing Frank at one point) despite not even knowing his name. During the climax, even after being captured and locked in a jail cell by Skell, she remains a Defiant Captive 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. At the ending, she goes back into Witness Protection so she can one day testify against the mobsters responsible for her parents' deaths and ensure they remain in prison.
- Professional Killer: Skell, who was hired by mobsters to kill Rita and her dad, is apparently one of the best, and did manage to track them down in Witness Protection. 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.
- Red Herring: Joe is a little suspicious of the overly-friendly businessman sitting next to him on the plane at the beginning, but so far as we can tell, he has no involvement in the plot at all and is exactly who he seems to be, a nosy but well-meaning stranger.
- Sanity Slippage: 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.
- Secretly Dying: 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 Last Stand to give the kids a better chance of getting away.
- Sibling Murder: Narrowly averted, but almost a tragic, accidental version. Joe's head trauma-induced Fake Memories 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.
- Skinny Dipping: Rita is doing this when Joe initially encounters her after the hitman's murder attempt. It avoids Naked First Impression, 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.
- Sole Survivor: 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 Tabor family still alive by the end. She re-enters Witness Protection to be able to testify against the criminals again someday.
- Spotting the Thread: 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 from a distance earlier, 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 lost his memories.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: In standard Hardy Boys villain fashion, rather than just immediately killing Rita and Joe after he has them cornered and then being on his way, Skell decides to engage in some Evil Gloating for several minutes—even after Joe tells him to Get It Over With—which allows Frank to rig an explosion to draw him away so he can free them and leads to Skell's defeat and arrest soon after.
- Wistful Amnesia: 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.
- Witless Protection Program: The plot of the book kicks off because the gangsters have discovered the general vicinity of where the Tabors are hiding and sends a Professional Killer 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.
- Witness Protection: Mark Tabor gathered evidence against the mob and got them convicted and sent 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 the star witnesses and they'd get to go free. The mobsters 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". By the end, Rita, the Sole Survivor 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.
