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A review by ncrabb
Adam and Evil by Gillian Roberts
3.0
What do you do when you teach at one of Philadelphia’s hard-case schools, the administration doesn’t exactly appreciate you, and you have a student who is clearly off his rails? That’s the backdrop for this book, the ninth in the Amanda Pepper series. It won’t be a disappointment.
Amanda loves her students while simultaneously finding many of them frustrating for their hormonal quirks and teenage apathy. She continues to teach because there are those rare gem moments when she actually gets through to someone, and they catch a spark based on something she taught.
Adam Evans is no such student. Something is truly wrong with him. He exhibits all of the signs of a kid who is about to completely unravel. He hasn’t showered in days; he is in class but entirely absent, laughing inappropriately at inappropriate times and engaging in disruptive off-putting behavior.
So concerned for him is Amanda that she organizes a parent conference—a big mistake, since the parents don’t appreciate her observations. She is to blame, not the boy, and they make sure to file a rather nasty complaint with the cowardly principal as a result of the meeting.
Things continue to degenerate for Adam at school until one day, Pepper and her class visit the city’s storied public library. They tour the place in preparation for a final project. Among their tour guides is a nervous irritable woman who is ultimately strangled while the students are at lunch inside the library. Worse still, Adam has gone missing, and the cops, including Amanda’s sometimes seemingly unconcerned boyfriend, is convinced he strangled the woman. Not so fast, insists Amanda, and she sets out to prove the young man innocent and get him help.
All of this happens at a time when Amanda herself is at a crossroads. She’s not sure she wants the relationship with boyfriend cop C. J. McKenzie to continue, so absent is he all too often even when he’s in the house. She’s burning out on teaching, or so she thinks, and her mother has some kind of bizarre epiphany that enables her to encourage Amanda to walk away from everything and go back to grad school. Worse still, her lovable unconventional best friend, Sasha, is moving to London.
It is against this backdrop of transition and change that Amanda must solve a library killing before the cops arrest her student suspect and stop looking for the real killer. In the process of finding a killer, Amanda nearly loses her life, and even her traditional conventional sister, Beth, is endangered.
Amanda loves her students while simultaneously finding many of them frustrating for their hormonal quirks and teenage apathy. She continues to teach because there are those rare gem moments when she actually gets through to someone, and they catch a spark based on something she taught.
Adam Evans is no such student. Something is truly wrong with him. He exhibits all of the signs of a kid who is about to completely unravel. He hasn’t showered in days; he is in class but entirely absent, laughing inappropriately at inappropriate times and engaging in disruptive off-putting behavior.
So concerned for him is Amanda that she organizes a parent conference—a big mistake, since the parents don’t appreciate her observations. She is to blame, not the boy, and they make sure to file a rather nasty complaint with the cowardly principal as a result of the meeting.
Things continue to degenerate for Adam at school until one day, Pepper and her class visit the city’s storied public library. They tour the place in preparation for a final project. Among their tour guides is a nervous irritable woman who is ultimately strangled while the students are at lunch inside the library. Worse still, Adam has gone missing, and the cops, including Amanda’s sometimes seemingly unconcerned boyfriend, is convinced he strangled the woman. Not so fast, insists Amanda, and she sets out to prove the young man innocent and get him help.
All of this happens at a time when Amanda herself is at a crossroads. She’s not sure she wants the relationship with boyfriend cop C. J. McKenzie to continue, so absent is he all too often even when he’s in the house. She’s burning out on teaching, or so she thinks, and her mother has some kind of bizarre epiphany that enables her to encourage Amanda to walk away from everything and go back to grad school. Worse still, her lovable unconventional best friend, Sasha, is moving to London.
It is against this backdrop of transition and change that Amanda must solve a library killing before the cops arrest her student suspect and stop looking for the real killer. In the process of finding a killer, Amanda nearly loses her life, and even her traditional conventional sister, Beth, is endangered.