Acceleration

Oh, what to do on a hot, hot summer day, when there's nowhere to go and your Dad's forced you to take a nine-to-five job in the dank subway system, rifling through people's misplaced umbrellas and eyeglasses? Well, that's the question of the day - everyday - for Duncan, who spends his free time - and is there ever a lot of it! - trying on lost jackets, shooting lost basketballs into cardboard boxes, and ultimately discovering the lost diary of a would-be serial murderer. From the moment he picks the book up - near the beginning I find what looks like notes from a science experiment.... It's an experiment to find out how long it takes for mice to drown in different liquids - he knows it's something really sick. As days wear on and he finds himself reading farther and farther into the journal, he learns that this psycho is out to actually step up from the kids' stuff - do more than just mutilate animals and set buildings on fire. He's going to murder a woman.


The author did some really great stuff with the characters in this book. Not only was I interested, I felt like I was reading about people I knew, people I had known all my life, yet still wanted to find out more about. From Duncan's nightmares about the girl he couldn't save from drowning, to his friends, all struggling with their own personal battles, everyone seems so alive and real. Though I wasn't too fond of Duncan himself, I was absolutely enraptured with his friends, and overall I felt just like Duncan, unable to wait for the next chapter, to get past the boredom of the dusty lost-and-found station and on to the next stage of the plot.

Normally, I'm not a fan of mysteries. At all. This book was a bit of an exception for me, because though you really feel like you can predict the ending of the book just by reading the summary - DUNCAN CATCHES MURDERER, FINDS RECOGNITION FROM POLICE AND PARENTS, GETS PAST HIS OWN INNER DEMONS, WINS HEART OF EX-GIRLFRIEND, STRIKES IMPRESSIVE POSE - in the end it's very realistic. It seems much more like a real-life account, of something that actually happened, not some cheesy superhero comic like most mysteries I've read.

All I can complain about is Duncan's incredible lack of judgement, deciding to try and catch the murderer himself... It is worth noting that such endings - including a dark basement, a crazy man with a knife, and a head-on collision with a train, all of which Duncan survives - only happen in fiction, and though obvious effort was made to have a basis in reality, it's just a little unbelievable.