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Anyone who knows me knows that I don't like mysteries. I don't like how predictable most of them are, or how easy it is as a reader to be able to solve the problem. For a very, very long time I've been a firm believer that all mysteries are the same. Some wrong doing is done, someone is framed, and, in the end, the truth comes out.
But that is not the case with Nearly Gone.
I laughed at the jokes of Albert Einstein, gasped in horror when Reece was beat up, wept when Nearly had the falling out with Jeremy. This book truly is a whirlwind of emotions that it almost takes your focus away from trying to figure out who is killing all of the students Nearly tutors after school. Key word: Almost. The reader is playing detective along with Nearly for most of the novel, but does so in a way that they don't care about actually figuring out who killed them, but why Nearly is being framed.
Nearly is a Junior fighting for a chemistry scholarship. It's her one way ticket out of the trailer park she has lived in with her mother since her father left them. She's tired of the stares her neighbors and classmates give her. She's tired of having to take money out of her mom's tip jar for her newspaper (which she reads religiously.) She's tired of about everything. This scholarship is the only thing Nearly has going for her, and she's so close to victory that she can taste it.
There are some... complications though.
The students she tutors are being killed off one by one, and she is the reason why. Only she can stop the killer from striking again. The perpetrator is leaving ominous verses in the Missed Connections section of the newspaper that Nearly reads, telling her exactly where he will strike next. He's leaving numbers on the victims arms as clues for her to figure out.
The first victim, Emily, was lucky. She survived, and was only shaken up by being drugged and left under the bleachers. There's a reason for that though.
The next few were not so lucky, and it left Nearly breaking every rule she had to find answers. She felt responsible for their murders-- as if she could just figure out who was doing this, get to the next spot before the victim was killed, she could stop it.
Meanwhile, she is the number one suspect in the murder investigation, and has been since she went to the police with the hunch that the murders are linked somehow by the notes in the Missed Connections. This made the police send a narc-- actually, it was a juvenile delinquent looking for a clean record and a way out of the system, to get to know Nearly. Basically the police thought she was holding back information on the murders and wanted proof of her guilt to arrest her. Here's another problem. Reece kinda has the hots for her, and withholds information that could be incriminating towards her because he knows that she's being set up.
The ending is a bit of surprise, though. I had originally thought that the absentee dad was the killer because of how Jeremy had mentioned that he was a gambler. And, you know, numbers can be a part of gambling. But, as it turns out, it was a classmate of hers, who used his girlfriend to set the plan into motion, because he had a grudge against Nearly for something her dad did. The numbers had nothing to do with gambling. The classmate had used Nearly's best subject, Chemistry, against her by writing the atomic numbers of elements on the victims to spell out her name. It was a ploy to make authorities she was the killer.
I think this is a very good book. Which is astonishing coming from me because I don't usually read novels like this. However, it does have violence and drugs in it, so that's something to keep in mind when picking it out for a younger reader. If they have the maturity level to read it, though, I would definitely recommend it!
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