Gideon Green in black and white

In Henry's (This Will Be Funny Someday) funny, heartwarming take on film noir, retired 16-year-old detective Gideon Green routinely wears a trench coat and felt fedora, and--following the fall of his once-successful kid detective agency--eats alone in the school cafeteria. But when his former best friend Lily Krupitsky-Sharma, who dumped him in the seventh grade, approaches him for help, he agrees--hoping to prove that "I was right to consider myself a detective." Lily, now the school newspaper's features editor, wants to write a story about an uptick in nonviolent crime in their Southern California town, San Miguel--and Gideon has the detecting skills she needs. So he joins the newspaper as copy editor, a gig that involves detecting "what's wrong," but the stakes are considerably raised when the duo discovers a dead man. Gideon proves equal to his noir heroes, falls into a rousing romance with the newspaper editor, and heals his troubled relationship with his single-parent dad in an entertaining, emotional read. Snippets of the story rendered in noir-style prose add an amusing note to the writing's overall excellence. Gideon is of Mexican descent; Lily is "a brown girl with two moms." Ages 13--up. Agent: Sarah LaPolla, Bradford Literary. (May)

A 16-year-old detective discovers that noir films are at best iffy guides to both real-life crime investigations and personal relationships. Pulled away from his bedroom and massive library of old movies by Lily Krupitsky-Sharma, a childhood friend--turned--ex-friend since middle school, who asks for help with a story she's secretly writing for the school newspaper, Gideon finds himself both intrigued by oddities in their SoCal town's crime statistics and dazzled by the paper's smart, charismatic, bisexual editor-in-chief, Tess Espinoza. Deftly twirling noir and rom-com tropes together, Henry chucks in, on the one hand, a corpse, all sorts of conveniently placed evidence of police corruption, and even a comprehensive overheard confession, and on the other, a meet-cute in a bustling newsroom that leads Gideon and Tess into a heady and hilarious high school romance that is likewise chock full of revelations and confessions. Gifted with Sherlock-ian powers of observation, Gideon is so full of himself that he actually wears a trench coat and a fedora. Still, by the end he has not only learned how to rein in his impulse to blurt out infuriating personal comments, but has found ways to mend his relations with Lily and with his single dad, too. Gideon's father is Mexican and White, and brown-skinned Lily has two moms; names cue some ethnic diversity in the supporting cast. A tongue-in-cheek charmer: Sit back and enjoy the show. (Fiction. 13-17) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.