Finding Lubchenko -- Michael Simmons

I avoided this book for over a year because, in short, I'm dumb.  I avoided it due to the title because I assumed it was (don’t hate me, Colleen) some sort of historical war-type story along the lines of Saving Private Ryan, but maybe with Russian characters. 

I was shelving recently, picked it up and flipped it open:

So this is basically a story about a murder. It’s a story about a murder and the fact that the cops said my dad did it.  All implausible, but still a lot of trouble for my father.  But I’ll get to that.  The story actually begins with a smaller crime.  It was really just a way for me to earn a little money.  And when I tell you what I was doing, you probably won’t even think it was wrong.  Not really a crime.  I was actually only stealing from myself, if you really think about it, although there are probably a few people who would disagree with me on this.

So, no.  Not a war story.  A mystery/thriller, in fact.

I’m sorry to say, though, that after about seventy pages, my interest waned.  It’s a bad, bad sign when it takes me four days to read less than three hundred pages.  Even worse when the text is double-spaced.  And even worse, a thriller.  Thrillers are supposed to, you know, thrill you.

At first, I really did enjoy Evan’s voice.  He was chatty and somewhat self-deprecating and sounded like a New Kind of Character.

But he got old fast.  I didn't find him interesting -- he doesn’t get along with his father, misses his dead mother, has a crush on his best friend, hates school and sells office equipment on eBay that he steals from his father’s company.  That’s it.  He doesn’t seem to have any interests, any dreams (other than inheriting his father’s money), any passions*.  Because of that, his narration got repetitive and skimmable, and I wasn't even interested enough in him to dislike him, let alone like him.

Lot of action can sometimes make up for uninteresting characters -- there are lots of very popular, page-turner-y thrillers that feature cardboard characters**.  But for a book that includes international intrigue, possible weapons of mass destruction, smallpox smuggling, a romance, blackmail and murder, there was not much action to be found. Finding Lubchenko was SLOW.  Occasional moments were thrilling, but the plot twists (the very few that there were) were extremely predictable.

And the plot... I couldn’t buy it.  Spoilers follow.

Evan & Co. are under eighteen, yet they assume that they’ll go to jail if they come forward with the the stolen laptop -- which includes info about a plan to smuggle and sell live strains of smallpox.  While I guess that’s a possibility, it seems more likely that they’d just get a slap on the wrist.  The person who stood to lose the most was Evan’s friend, Ruben -- his participation in the scam would likely affect his chances at attending Harvard -- but Ruben WANTED to turn in the laptop. 

If I'd cared enough to dislike Evan, this would have been enough to put me over the edge --- he concealed information about people stealing and smuggling live strains of smallpox because, basically, he was too much of a weenie to admit what he'd done.  That's not the act of a cool person.  It's the act of an unlikeable version of Steve Sanders.

At the very end, wouldn’t Evan’s father (who is supposedly brilliant) have suspected that something was odd when the Bad Guy tried to murder Evan? Then again, Evan’s father wasn’t a particularly well-rounded character either.

Lastly, the guy on the cover looks like someone I’d like to slap.

Whew.  I feel better now that that’s out of my system.  I had a decent long run of good reads -- it was bound to hit a snag somewhere.  But, wow.  SLJ gave it a great review:

"...an uproariously fast-paced, James Bond-like spy chase through upscale Paris, all seen through the eyes of a quick-thinking, smart-mouthed ne'er-do-well..." 

Fast-paced?  Uproarious?  Quick-thinking?  CHASE?  Did we read the same book?

I assume I'm in the minority on this one, as there's a sequel.

*I realize that there are plenty of people like that in the real world, but that doesn’t make them interesting reading.

**See Brown, Dan.