Bill Lavender - Obedience

When the students in Winchester University's Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or text, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered.

At first the students are as intrigued by premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous ?

The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurred - and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.

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Reading this book it sort of felt like not only were the characters in the book played big time but the reader as well. Here's the assignment: Solve this case and you save a fictitious, innocent life and it took me into a world of memorizing clues that were given to the students.
I had a clue which way this book would go after a certain intimate talk between two characters but by then the book was far away from being finished. Over a flood of new information I almost forgot about my own theory but wasn't surprised to find it affirmed in the end. But nevertheless the book keeps the a lot of surprised and twists your mind.

In case you decide to read it keep in mind, there is no randomness and distractions take way of track. ;-)

The book would have gotten five stars from me if it weren't for the ending. It was a logic ending from my small point of view but it also fell flat and didn't hold up to the rest of the book.

Rating:
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Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books (February 19, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 030739610X
ISBN-13: 978-0307396105