Defender by Graham McNamee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Goodreads 2 stars = “It was ok” which is just how I felt about this one. Tyne (“Tiny”), the main character, is a six foot six inch high school girl living in a low-rent apartment building in a sleazy area of Toronto. She and her skinny little boyfriend Stick find a body in a sealed up shaft in the basement. That’s enough of the plot. The characters were all comic-book implausible one-dimensional caricatures you might see on Saturday morning TV. Tiny is a massive protector, Stick is a computer genius, Vega is the female hood with ‘tude who can hot wire cars. Even the parents are former drug runners or have similar unsavory pasts. It’s hard to believe this author won an Edgar award. He writes like his target audience is eleven years old. The guilty party is so easy to spot I knew “who dunnit” the instant he was introduced. This is a short, quick read but not very satisfying. Goodreads 2 is the same as Amazon 3, so I’ll boost the two stars to three on my blog.