Paced like a television police procedural, with flashes of epiphany, false leads, and race-against-time dangers, this...
Sherlock Holmes, if Holmes were a biracial, at-risk, 16-year-old slacker—a genius stoner who consorts with burglars and homeless dropouts.
Garvie is many things: a math whiz and certified genius with a photographic memory; a layabout who rarely goes to class; a smartarse; "a rational thinker, precise and unsentimental." His friends call him Sherlock and Puzzle Boy. He's also the ex-boyfriend of Chloe Dow, a violet-eyed, busty, charismatic, unpopular—and now dead—blonde white girl. Chloe's murder knocks Garvie out of his bored semistupor. Despite his mother's threats to move the family to her native Barbados, Garvie throws himself into the investigation with all his reckless brilliance. Detective Inspector Singh, the Sikh police officer investigating Chloe's murder, is torn between exasperation and reluctant gratitude for the boy's Holmes-ian deductions. Garvie ponders seemingly unrelated clues—a black Porsche, a shopping list, ugly lime-green–and-orange running shoes—and puts together a disturbing story of victimization. Girls and women in Garvie's world seem mostly to be ineffectual, oversexed, or victims of violent and sexually predatory men. Meanwhile, though Garvie himself is a welcome mixed-race detective, several of the other characters are drawn with stale, albeit affectionate stereotypes.
Paced like a television police procedural, with flashes of epiphany, false leads, and race-against-time dangers, this satisfying whodunit overcomes its characterization shortcomings. (Mystery. 13-15)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-338-03642-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: David Fickling/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Lucky U.K. readers get cliffhangers and toothsome prose, but at least Americans still get the thrills of the shooting...
In a very near future, two teenagers in a scarcely functional London are caught up in terrorist plots.
Nat and Charlie live in an England with an economy just a touch worse than the real thing: Austerity cuts are closing hospitals, shrinking police departments, and leaving countless people unemployed and hungry. As the novel opens, Charlie, fighting with her mum in the free food line, barely survives the terrorist bomb that claims her mother's life. Nat knows about the bomb but—convinced his brother, Lucas, is the bomber—tries and fails to stop the attack in time. Now Charlie lives with relatives, and Nat (who hasn't reported his suspicions about Lucas) needs to understand his now-comatose brother's motivations. How had cheerful, peaceful Lucas fallen in with the racist terrorists of the League of Iron? In a series of brief first-person chapters, Nat and Charlie cope with the bombing's aftermath. Nat's attempts to infiltrate the League of Iron lead both teenagers into dangerous plots against the people and government of England (and into conversations with thugs who make violent, despicable, racist threats). Despite their attempts to defeat the villains, everything goes to hell just in time for the heavily foreshadowed reveals to set up the sequel. Though the action-packed suspense is up to snuff, heavy-handed Americanization leaves both characters and setting bland and flavorless.
Lucky U.K. readers get cliffhangers and toothsome prose, but at least Americans still get the thrills of the shooting practice and bombing plots . (Thriller. 13-15)Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1394-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
A finale that requires homework of its readers.
Telekinesis, flying teens, reinhabited bodies, giants and more: The Society of Extranaturals returns for the conclusion to the Twelve-Fingered Boy trilogy.
Right from the get-go readers are plunged almost too quickly into the action of Jacobs’ finale. Awakened by a din of screams and crashing trees outside their bunker, Shreve and Jack, heroes of the previous two installments, rally their troops to battle the Conformity, a conglomeration of thousands of innocent human victims fused together into a brown, jellylike bipedal mass by “some massive and unknown telekinetic power.” The Conformity stands stories tall, wreaks havoc wherever it walks and sucks up other humans into its body as it goes. Not only is the action hard to follow from the first page, but it’s interspersed with confusing, often unattributed dialogue that is either spoken or telepathically sent, the latter set apart in bolded italics rather than with quotation marks. Just when readers have almost wrapped their heads around the flying teen heroes, strange communication signals and extensive back story and have settled into this otherwise fairly fast-paced third, Jacobs confoundingly switches gears midway through and adds multiple narrators. All this said, the novel isn’t without genuine action and exciting thrills, it’s just hard to penetrate through the ether to get to the good stuff.
A finale that requires homework of its readers. (Supernatural thriller. 13-15)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7613-9009-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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