The boy Detective Fails

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Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

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This book fails. submitted by eknapp on September 24, 2015, 7:40pm The plan was solid. Take a Cyclopedia Brown boy detective (Billy Argo), let him grow up (he goes to criminology school), smack him with a personal tragedy (his assistant/little sister commits suicide), expose him to messy adult problems (ten years in a mental health hospital, OCD, depression...), and see what happens.

The beginning is good, a solid parody of the Cyclopedia Brown series, with simple well-organized mysteries, clues galore, and case after case solved by the intrepid boy hero, his sister, and his best friend.

It falls apart as soon as they all grow up, simply because Joe Meno writes badly, I think. The whole story is a series of non-sequiturs (or at least the first 170 pages, which is where I threw in the towel). Billy gets shot, then just goes to work. He gets caught in a terrorist explosion then goes home to bed. A little girl's pet rabbit is decapitated, and she reacts by wondering where its head is. About half of Billy's lines are "whispered" and in most cases it makes no sense in context.

The writing is exceedingly prim and proper at all times, which could potentially create a jarring contrast when relating Billy's sister's suicide or describing the headless bunny. But given the rest of the fail it just makes me think Meno doesn't know what he wants to do.