dannip23 's review for:

Odd Child Out by Gilly Macmillan

3.0

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Privileged Noah and his best friend, Somali refugee Abdi, sneak out at night — and Noah ends up in a coma. Abdi isn't speaking now, so no one knows what happened. Did Abdi push him in the canal, or was it an accident? Detective Clemo is on the case, determined to prove himself, but his ex-girlfriend Emma Zhang is now a journalist and she's sticking her nose in, riling everything up.

Spoiler

Noah dies so now it's a potential murder case; Abdi learns his mother was raped in a refugee camp and searches for his biological father, who's a dangerous criminal; actually it turns out Noah committed suicide and had filled his bag with weights before going into the canal because he wanted to die instead of suffering from his terminal cancer

I will say that the characters were engaging and unpredictable, but the plot really just fizzled by the middle for me.