loribonesscaswell

Dollycas’s Thoughts

This is an absolutely wonderful story that features a great whodunit too!

Samuel Hoenig has Asperger’s Syndrome and in fact is quite a genius. When you first start reading you may think he is like Adrian Monk of television fame and the books by Hy Conrad and Lee Goldberg, but Mr. Monk has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and that is very different from Asperger’s.

Samuel has opened up a business, Questions Answered, and his new client has a doozy of question – Who took the head of a woman from my cryogenics lab? Another woman, Mrs. Washburn, had come in to ask Samuel a question herself but this newcomer’s question definitely takes precedence. In fact she tags also as Samuel’s assistant in his endeavor to find this “missing head”.

I love Samuel. I love the way he takes care of his mom and she takes care of him. I love how quickly he gets close to Mrs. Washburn and they way she understands his unique personality. These characters a flashed out and real and they jump off the pages.

Then we have the characters at Garden State Cryonics Institute. They are a very interesting group from the CEO that asked the “question” to the Security Commander who thinks everyone is pointing figures his way for the missing cranium.

We also meet Detective Lapides who is really in uncharted waters with a case of this magnitude. Nothing like this have ever taken place for him to investigate. Plus he needs to deal with Laverne and Arthur Masters, the mother and brother of the woman whose head was being preserved at the institute and is now missing.

Most of the story takes place at the cryogenics lab and it is quite a place. It seems to give Samuel more questions than answers at first. The reader gets to follow him through his process of interviewing suspects, identifying clues and following where they lead and basically getting to understand the way Samuel evaluates things to answer the question.

The authors have also shown us a bit of the funny side to Samuel’s life, things that those around him have grown to love about him. So truthful as those who have loved ones with this disorder will recognize. It affects people differently and at different levels but I feel the authors are created a wonderful protagonist and written a great mystery around him while at the same time creating awareness about Asperger’s.

I truly can not wait to read the next story in this series. These authors have hit it out of the park on this one! and I think Samuel has answered his baseball question as well!!