One thing that I like about the Peter Abrahams’ mysteries I’ve read, Reality Check included, is that it’s regular people noticing things who solve the mysteries around them; they’re not detectives, they aren’t Nancy Drew types; they just start paying attention and piecing both obvious and not-so-obvious things together until they figure it all out.
The every-day guy in Reality Check (April 2009), is 17 year old Cody. He has 2 passions in life: being the QB for his high school football team and his smart, beautiful girlfriend Clea. But as junior year starts, he loses both: football to a torn ACL and Clea to a rich boarding school on the East Coast. The first third of the novel follows a depressed Cody as he drops out of school, gets a job and sinks into a deep depression.
But all that changes when he sees the local paper highlighting a story that a local girl has gone missing. And that girl is Clea. Cody impulsively gets in his car and drives from CO to Clea’s school in Vermont to find out what happened to her. Once there, he starts to uncover the town’s secrets; the rift between the school population and the townies; the politics of the students; and the seedier side of small town life.
After building Cody up as a “dumb jock,” it’s great to watch him slowly start to piece the clues he finds together and realize that he sees something others don’t. His outsider perspective, along with his thoughtful, stubborn personality, make him a great detective and a keen observer of people. Reality Check, while slow to get going, ends up being a suspenseful, engaging, and fact-paced mystery.
- Posted by Cori
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