Assume Nothing

 

Assume Nothing by Joshua Corin is an excellent YA read. The protagonist is a 15-year-old girl, Kat McCann, but the reader does not learn her name until a little ways into the book. Rather, she introduces herself by the username she uses in a specific AOL chatroom, KMcCann14. The chatroom is a key element in story since it is solely devoted to the mystery writer Carissa Miller who has written numerous murder mysteries which have been solved by the detective fictional detective Adrian Lescher. It’s in the chatroom that Kat meets Dev whose chatroom name is WmbleyLnDet, meant to pay honor to Lescher whose address in central London was on Wembley Lane.

 

The chatroom was filled with intense devotees of Carissa’s books who often played obscure trivia games about those novels. It was in the chatroom that Kat met Dev, and when they discovered they both lived in Boston, and they met so they could attend a lecture at Harvard by Alik Lisser who was the real life detective and criminologist about whom Lescher was created for the novels. We learn that Dev is 19 years old and is attending college.

 

As the book develops, we learn that Kat suffered multiple tragedies. Starting with her mother’s death and her father’s imprisonment, she had significant signs of post-traumatic stress and ongoing struggles with anxiety. She was just six years old when her mother was murdered and her father was convicted of having been the murderer, something that Kat was never willing to accept as a fact. She was quickly shipped off to live with her aunt and uncle. Over the course of the story, we’re told about the several other murders that were impacting Kat’s life. Eventually, Kat confessed to Dev that her mother’s murder had been the plot for one of Carissa’s books, a crime which Lisser had solved. At the age of 70, after having penned so many novels, Carissa suddenly disappeared and left no clue about what happened to her. The chatroom characters were distressed about the loss of their favorite mystery writer.

 

I don’t want to give away the plot, but I’ll tell you that the plot, subplots, main characters, and accessory characters are all well put together. There’s a major and unexpected plot event at the 1/3 mark of the book, and it took the rest of the novel to deal with that change.

 

I think this novel is one that my 11-year-old grandson would enjoy. He is reading at a level of sophistication that far exceeds his peers. Perhaps this story will help him see the joy in reading such mysteries. I liked this story and would give it a strong recommendation, especially to teen readers.