Review: Finally - a different investigator
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 19, 2014
I applaud the author's choice to use a woman with highly functional autism as her lead character. The team she allows to build around her, a law enforcement detective, criminals, a hacker and her mentor at the art insurance organization she works in, introduces us to different individual characteristics that make for very interesting study. The science of body and facial language is liberally shared in this thriller and provides interesting side bars to the story.Genevieve Lenard, highly skilled in reading facial and body language, lover of lists and with the ability to find patterns in behavior and events, is called in to help solve the mystery behind the murder of an unidentified female with a piece of canvas identified as a Gauguin painting, a dead Russian who died shouting an apparently insensible riddle and stolen military weapons.I don't know enough about autism to know if a person who has been thus diagnosed would so easily be able to master control over some of her coping mechanisms. In this case, our protagonist, at the beginning of the story, needs to write out Mozart compositions on music sheets in order to calm herself down, but over the course of a matter of days, she appears to no longer need that familiar coping mechanism but has managed to switched to just imagining writing the scores in her mind in order to calm herself down.It's an interesting and entertaining thriller, not least because of the interplay between the characters and I'm looking forward to following this series.