In the first half of 2002, I got most of the way through a self-contained YA mystery series. I think there were ten books in total, each about 100-120 pages, probably published recently. I was attending a Canadian high school at the time and discovered the series while volunteering at another school’s library. I read all but the last one (I suspect the school year ended before I had a chance to borrow that one). I’d like to know how the series concluded, but every attempt I’ve made at finding these books online has hit a dead end. I either find nothing, or I find an earlier online description of the series that I wrote in 2015.
The protagonist is a young woman from Australia (as I recall), about sixteen, named something like Blake or Blaine. The series has her name in the title along the lines of ‘The Blake Journals’ or ‘The Blaine Files’ or the like. The first volume opens with her leaving home in a carefully thought-out plan to run away. She disappears in the middle of the night, grabs her possessions, and takes to the road on some kind of motor scooter or moped. We eventually learn that her goal is to locate her biological mother, who vanished years ago. As I recall, there’s very little in terms of action-adventure: this is more about a quiet and painstaking solo quest.
The books’ cover images were nearly identical. They all had the series title in large yellow-and-black typography, staggered a bit for a vintage-typewriter look to convey mystery/edginess. If I had to guess, a publishing house cranked these out in a short period of time as a one-off, but clearly the series intrigued me enough that I read about 90% of it, and now I’m finding it tantalizing.
To help narrow the search: Do you recall if the books are by an Australian author and/or set in Australia? Or is the girl from Australia but living in North America?
Thanks! I’m pretty sure she was living in Australia.
I finally solved this one! A ten-book series by Jenny Pausacker called ‘The Blake Mysteries’, published by Hodder in 1998 and 1999.
(I’d tried just about every combination of keywords I could think of on Google Books and FictionDB, and when that came to nothing, some mix of curiosity and exasperation made me decide to brute-force it. I searched Biblio.com for copies of children’s/YA books published between 1994 and 2003 and then scrolled past about eight hundred of them before I got a hit. I’m not sure whether I recommend this strategy, but it worked.)