In this young adult action thriller, King (William Lyon Mackenzie--but not the Canadian prime minister) lives on McNeil Island. His dad is a prison guard for the federal penitentiary there; his mom is in a Tacoma hospital, comatose after a stroke. Two weeks before the story opens, King's best friend, Blake Watt, a fourteen-year-old computer hacker (and also a son of prison employees) drowned in the waters surrounding the island, apparently during an escape attempt. A funeral was held, but the casket was empty--the body was never recovered. Now, King is receiving e-mails from his dead friend--messages that are sent out from a web site when a user doesn't log in on a daily basis (an action known as a "dead man's switch"). Before his death, Blake discovered that King's dad was involved in some highly illegal activity along with prominent prison officials. Now, it is King's task to find out what that activity was and to make things right.

Brouwer draws on Richard Connell's short story, "The Most Dangerous Game" and, with a liberal dose of technology, more or less updates the story for modern teenaged boys. While Brouwer's book is certainly compelling in its twists and turns, King isn't given much fleshing out, and doesn't, in fact, seem to be a teenage boy. His age is never provided, but one assumes he's 14 or 15 years old. The book rather reminded me of Anthony Horowitz's boy spy series Alex Ryder, but Horowitz is rather better at getting the essential "boyishness" of the boy protagonist right. Family relationships are equally sparsely conveyed, and rather stereotypical. Having said that, I think many 8th to 10th grade boys I know would enjoy Dead Man's Switch.
Rating 3.5 ( )