Joe Ide blasts onto the crime fiction scene as one of the most exciting voices in recent years, introducing readers to engaging protagonist Isaiah Quintabe in IQ.
Isaiah may be a high school dropout, but his intelligence is off the charts. He sees details others don't, and uses inductive--the opposite of deductive--reasoning to find missing items or resolve situations for his neighbors in East Long Beach, Calif. At first his clients pay him in food or goods, but as his reputation grows, Isaiah graduates to gigs that pay in money.
His latest client is rap star Black the Knife, real name Calvin Wright, who believes someone is out to kill him. Wright refuses to leave his mansion, while his manager desperately needs the rapper in the studio to finish his latest album. Isaiah is hired to solve the case, to make Wright feel safe going outside again, and discovers there is in fact a killer hunting the artist, one who has chilling methods and has never failed to slay his prey.
Mystery fans should hunt down IQ; Isaiah and his sidekick, Dodson, are a hilarious urban version of Holmes and Watson. One can hear the characters talking in their lively, rhythmic dialogue, and the descriptions paint vivid pictures: "Miss Myra wondered if Ed was auditioning for a part in a movie about rednecks with his Hitler haircut and Mr. Potato Head ears." Besides providing laugh-out-loud moments, the story is also gritty and tragic and melancholy, just like life where IQ lives. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd