World Without Faces
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David doesn't recognize anybody at his new high school, and he never will. He has prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder that prevents him from recognizing people's faces. With a few tricks and the help of a best friend, David manages to keep his disorder a secret and lead a normal life at school. When he witnesses his best friend's murder, however, David is left with a broken arm and a feeling of abject helplessness: he can't even give the police a description of the killer. When a student confesses to the murder, David's feeling of relief is short-lived. Although individuals with prosopagnosia can't tell who people are, they can sometimes tell who people aren't, and David knows that the confessing student is not the murderer. But after David argued for so long that he doesn't know what the murderer looks like, nobody believes him when he claims the real murderer is still among them. Now David's own life is in jeopardy unless he can catch the killer, but solving this crime won't be easy: he's no better at recognizing any potential witnesses or suspects than he was at recognizing the murderer. Still, he can't give up. He's needed help identifying people all of his life; it's finally time to return the favor, and identify for his school the face of a murderer.
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I won this book on Goodreads, but was not reimbursed in any way for this review, except for getting to keep the book.
I liked the concept of this book (boy who can't recognize faces is eyewitness to his friend's murder), but I have to admit to being a bit nervous about whether or not it would be written in a believable way, particularly since most eyewitnesses in mysteries tend to rely on a lot of visual clues. I've read a fair number of mysteries, but I think this is the first one where the detective already knows he can never trust his own eyes.
Despite my doubts, I really enjoyed the story, right from the start. It was well-written (although the quotation marks were occasionally poorly edited) and entertaining. The clues came at a good pace & were generally both understandable & believable. Most of the characters were authentic enough to forget they were in a book. I sympathized with David even when I thought he was being stupid (standard omniscient-reader-recognized stupidity).
On the minus side, it has more adolescent angst & bad language/situations than I enjoy, but I guess that's normal in many places. I'm also not sure that a few of the characters would act quite that way (cop was too single-minded then suddenly reversed, murderer was too easy-going, certain girl had no brains at all). The action scene at the end dragged on too long. As faults go, however, they are easy to forgive.
Don't take the three stars to be a slight–it really does mean I liked the book. Enjoy!
