Assume Nothing

Comic book writer Corin (American Lies) delivers a dollop of metafictional creepiness in this playful whodunit set in 1995 Boston. Plucky 16-year-old Kat McCann, a self-described “book-obsessed dork,” has become fixated on the work of recently deceased mystery writer Carissa Miller. Miller’s most famous series featured cases based on investigations conducted by real-life Austrian detective Alik Lisser; 10 years earlier, Lisser helped put Kat’s father in jail for murdering her mother. When Lisser gives a lecture at Harvard, Kat attends with her aunt. Afterward, Lisser offers to pay their way to London for a visit. They eagerly accept, stirring up envy in the Carissa Miller chat room Kat frequents. Once she’s in England, however, Kat starts to feel uneasy as her time with Lisser leads her to question the truth about her mother’s death and the precise nature of his creative partnership with Miller. When Kat returns to Boston, people she knows start turning up dead, and she fears she might be next. Corin bolsters his clever conceit with a winning protagonist, but the flatness of the supporting characters—many of whom are bumbling adults who seem only to exist so Kat can outfox them—sometimes lends the novel a YA feel. Still, readers will have fun puzzling out Kat’s predicament. Agent: Stacey Graham, 3 Seas Literary. (Dec.)