Nancy Drew is a fictional amateur sleuth. In the original versions of the series, she is a 16-year-old high school graduate, and in later versions, is rewritten and aged to be an 18-year-old high school graduate and detective. In the series, she lives in the fictional town of River Heights with her father, attorney Carson Drew, and their housekeeper, Hannah Gruen. As a child (age ten in the original versions and age three in the later version), she loses her mother. Her loss is reflected in her early independence—running a household since the age of ten with a clear-cut servant in early series and referring to the servant as a surrogate parent in later ones. As a teenager, she spends her time solving mysteries, some of which she stumbles upon and some of which begin as cases of her father's. Nancy is often assisted in solving mysteries by her two closest friends: cousins Bess Marvin and George Fayne. Bess is delicate and feminine, while George is a tomboy. Nancy is also occasionally joined by her boyfriend Ned Nickerson, a student at Emerson College.