DNF 25%

Not quite what I'm looking for at the moment.

Cute, funny guy read with well-drawn characters. ( )

Guy is still dealing with the loss of his larger-than-life father. When someone breaks into his home and steals the coins his dad discovered as part of a sunken treasure (Really), he and his friends from the forensics club are on the case to try to figure it out. The stakes get higher after they also discover a dead body on a golf course with matching prints!
A bit slow at times, but the characters are quirky and likeable. ( )

I was a bit disappointed when I read the book. It’s not very bad, but after I read what it was about, I had hoped to see the murder victim and the investigation sooner. The murder victim doesn’t appear until the second half of the book. The first half is very slow and although it is not too boring to see Guy’s everyday life, this could have been written a bit faster.

The second half of the book, on the other hand, is very interesting to read. We finally see the murder and the investigation has some nice plot twists.

The story is narrated in first person by Guy. As the book starts with the burial of Guy’s father, we don’t know much about Guy previous to that and how or if his behaviour changed much after it. Although he can be witty and funny, most of the time his jokes are silly. Jokes about sex and the male anatomy are not funny if they are repeated all the time (or they are not funny at all). You only have to imagine all the things you don’t like about teenage boys and put them in one person and you have Guy. He’s not all bad and can be good if he really needs to, but most of the time he behaves like a spoilt ten year old.

This doesn’t change until he finds the murdered boy. As the boy looks like him and he has reasons to believe somebody is after him, Guy thinks he was murdered by mistake and that the real murder victim was meant to be himself. This forces him to grow up, so that the Guy we see in the second half of the book is much more mature.

If you like criminal mysteries and can make it through the first part of this book, you’ll enjoy the rest. ( )

I got this book from netgalley (first book I got from them for which I am truly grateful) and even though I just finished reading it I can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy once it's released (March 2012, can you believe we all have to wait that long?!).

This book managed to be consistently funny, but in a completely believable way, none of it seemed forced. The dialogue was a thing of beauty. I know it's a weird thing to say when describing teens talking, but that's just it - it was so unfailingly real.

But what I really loved about this book was its use of humour. The book, as I've said, is funny from beginning to end. Bear in mind I don't usually say this about just any book, humour is one of the few things I take seriously. But it's more than just that. Berk mixes in humorous dialogue or observations with more emotional moments, making them all the more poignant and sweeter. It's rare for an author to successfully use humour like that. Most will just write some jokes for their characters to blab so they can draw a few laughs from their readers, but to use it so well that it draws attention to deeper issues in the plot and the characters' lives and personalities... That is rare! I really hope other readers will take notice of that when they read the book, because this book really deserves to be noticed.

The plot is tight and never fails to draw the reader in. The characters are believable and well-written.

Honestly I could spend a long time writing about this book, but it just frustrates me that I'm not a great reviewer who could manage to do it justice.

That being said, I recommend this book to everyone, I don't see how anyone could dislike it. I may be a bit biased since I was a forensics nerd in high school and later a forensics nerd in university so a lot of it rang true. So if you have some forensics nerd friends, this book will be a solid gift when it comes out. ( )