A good mystery has an interesting puzzle and provides the reader with all the clues necessary to solve it. It also needs to be well-written, with characters the reader cares about. A good young adult mystery needs all that, but especially needs good character development.

This book offered none of these components. The writing style is hard-boiled detective mixed with a heaping spoonful of Sherlock Holmes, and a pinch of wacky small town high jinks. It might work if the characters were middle aged adults and the story was set in the 1940s (minus the wacky stuff; that just didn't make sense). The problem is that the characters are modern high-school students. Modern high-school students do not talk like characters from The Maltese Falcon.

The title character, Matthew Livingston, is a poor imitation of Sherlock Holmes, with the narrator being his bumbling Watson. The author attempts to portray Matthew as an eccentric genius with a mysterious past, but again the character is too young and too sheltered for believability. Like Holmes, Matthew pulls all the rabbits out of the hat to solve the mystery at the end of the story, and like Holmes, the reader is never given the same clues that Matthew has access to. The reader is forced to be as ignorant as the unobservant narrator and is left feeling condescended to and cheated.

The writing, as with many books in the hard-boiled detective genre, is florid and rambling. I was annoyed by the end of the first page, and gritting my teeth by the end of the first chapter. Misuse of cliches, such as "setting his sites" instead of "setting his sights" made things even worse.

I read this through to the end in the hopes that it would have an interesting resolution, but it didn't.

There are the seeds of a decent YA mystery in the book. The pivotal piece of evidence and the gimmick of the first murder are interesting and could have formed the foundation for a story that would have been enjoyable. If the author had kept the mystery simple and concentrated on creating believable, interesting teenage characters, with modern realistic dialogue, I'd probably be saying very different things. If the author takes the time to learn the craft of writing, one of his books may someday be worth reading. Today, however, is not that day. This book was not worth the time spent reading it. ( )