Books I've read this week - Obedience

I won Obedience by Will Lavender ©2008 from Stone Soup . (Thank you Katrina!) She has a weekly, Monday book giveaway. Make sure you visit her site. I started reading this book yesterday afternoon and couldn’t put it down. Maybe that’s why I got to bed a t 3:30 AM!! This was one of the most convoluted mysteries I have read in a long time.

From the book cover: “When the students in Winchester University’s Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered.

At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, the boundary between the classroom and the real world is blurred and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.”

So, a group of students in a Logic and Reasoning class only have one assignment. Using the clues given to them by their professor, they have six weeks to find an imaginary girl or she will be (hypothetically) murdered. But when the clues start to involve real people and real places, does that mean the girl is real also? Is the professor somehow involved in the disappearance and assumed murder of a young woman almost twenty years ago? Two of the students get so drawn into the story that before long they can’t tell truth from fiction. How far will they go to save the girl before the time is up? This story leads the reader in one direction and then another and the ending is not at all what you expect. Yes, someone does die but not whom you think. I was so mad at the end of the book because of what happened to some of the characters and the story kept running through my mind even after I put the book down. If you want a good, psychological thriller to read this summer that’s full of plot twists and turns, make sure you check out Obedience.