Fickle

Manus's debut depicts a mystery entirely through a blog devoted to noir, but the execution fails to match the intriguing concept. L.G. Fickel lets her audience in on a traumatic event she witnesses—the suicide of a man who jumps in front of a train at the Mass Avenue T station in Boston. Fickel, at least as she relates the story, soon moves from being merely a witness to becoming a person of interest once the police discover that the platform encounter she had with the dead man wasn't her first. Her accounts of her experiences with the official investigators provoke a slew of theories from posters to her blog, including one that the police are lurking on the Web site to get incriminating details from Fickel herself. Manus does a nice job of keeping the reader off balance as to what, if anything, has actually happened, but even Web-savvy readers may find the sniping and bickering of the posters, complete with crude insults, tough slogging. (Sept.)