I was hugely disappointed in this book. It is the story of a young teen that becomes obsessed with an empty house on the other side of the alley where he lives. It is a house that horrible murders took place many years prior. His mom knows the secret of the house and she ends of committing suicide and then the boy disappears. There is a serial killer on the loose and the assumption is he was now a victim of this man. There were parts of the story that were quite interesting but it did jump around a bit and I just, honestly, was not impressed with how this one went. ( )

Unfortunately, after the enjoyable sequence of 'Mystery' and 'The Throat' by this author, this novel, which continues the story of Tim Underhill, best-selling author, was a major disappointment. The first part, in which Tim's sister-in-law kills herself and Tim comes back home to attend the funeral, then his nephew Mark goes missing, was a good, slow, build-up of tension. Told in a mix of first person narrative from different viewpoints including Tim's journal, and shifting around in the time line, gradually it is revealed that Mark became obsessed with a derelict house directly behind his own, which eventually turned out to be connected to his own family in a horribly dark way.

But for me the book unravelled at the point where the 'ghost girl' appeared, and the ending was a contrived wish-fulfilment fantasy by Tim who couldn't face the likely truth. Even the cameo appearance of Tom Pasmore, hero of 'Mystery' who also played a key role in 'The Throat', failed to rescue it. (I did think quite early on, when Mark was telling his friend Jimbo that he wanted to find out who owned the abandoned house, that he should just ask his uncle Tim to get Tom to look it up online. When eventually Tim does do so, the identity of the present killer who has been abducting adolescent boys, is soon revealed - unlike one of the killers in 'The Throat' he didn't have the intelligence to hide his identity behind a corporation.)

Another problem I had with the book was its lack of continuity - it was established in the previous volumes plus 'Koko', that Tim had a sister, murdered as a child. In 'The Throat' Tim returns to his hometown and spends days there on two occasions (on the second, he and Tom were working undercover but that wasn't the case on his first visit) - and yet he never once visits his brother's family. As that takes place about eight years previously, Mark would have been about seven years old. Tim tells us frequently that he loves his nephew, although he and his brother don't get on, mainly because his brother is a sour, hardhearted and unloving man, yet Tim never once even mentioned that he had a brother, sister-in-law and nephew in either 'Koko' or 'The Throat', the previous two books where Tim figures largely. Also, in 'The Throat' it is clear that his parents' marriage ended soon after the murder of his sister, and his father became a homeless drunk. In the current volume, although a drinker his father does hang around for some years at least, taking his sons to bars. This is a major changed premise and made even weirder by the fact that Tim's sister isn't mentioned in this book either. I found it irritating. The author does like to play around with reader sensibilities - in 'The Throat' it transpired that 'Mystery' was apparently a book written by Tim Underhill and the major incident of Tom's childhood, being run over by a car, had instead happened to Tim - but I found this creation of a readymade family for Tim a step too far.

The shift from straight crime (the previous books about Tim) to weird supernatural didn't work for me. In the other books, Tim does "see dead people" from time to time, but it is left nicely ambiguous. It can be ascribed to his mental state, stress (some of the experiences happen in Vietnam after he has witnessed appalling scenes), or survivor guilt in the case of his glimpses of his dead sister, plus we know that Tim had a drug addiction when he lived in the far East for some years. In those stories, it is left open-ended as to whether he has really seen ghosts. But in this, we are expected to believe not only that the dead can affect the concrete, material world but that it is possible to somehow cross over to that realm in one's physical body. Even if this is just a consoling fantasy, the story as written forces this interpretation onto the reader.

Having now read the sequel, 'In the Night Room', things go on to unravel even further. In any case, with the present book, given that the first half was decent, I am awarding it 3 stars overall (3 stars on GR carries the 'liked it' connotation - I liked the first half at least). ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2005-03.html#lost-boy-lost-girl ( )

I was hugely disappointed in this book. It is the story of a young teen that becomes obsessed with an empty house on the other side of the alley where he lives. It is a house that horrible murders took place many years prior. His mom knows the secret of the house and she ends of committing suicide and then the boy disappears. There is a serial killer on the loose and the assumption is he was now a victim of this man. There were parts of the story that were quite interesting but it did jump around a bit and I just, honestly, was not impressed with how this one went. ( )

*Partial spoilers ahead*

An interesting premise, though Straub takes his time getting to the point and the reader occasionally may wonder if all the buildup is leading to anything. I enjoyed the vividly spooky phantom imagery borrowed from Henry James's classic ghost story "The Jolly Corner" (seasoned Straub fans will be aware of his longstanding fascination with James). In stylistic terms, Straub is fairly successful in translating the flavor of his 600-page bestsellers into a shorter, simpler format, and Lost Boy, Lost Girl is not a bad introduction to his writing for folks who aren't ready to tackle a big, daunting book like The Throat or Mr. X. Where it falls short is in its depiction of teenage characters. Kids are hard to write, I get it, and writing them realistically presents a challenge even for authors of Straub's caliber. Unfortunately, a lot of this novel consists of the interactions between two skateboarding adolescent boys, and the characterization, mannerisms and dialogue are consistently awkward throughout.

But don't avoid the book just because of that. Fans of The Throat, in particular, should read Lost Boy, Lost Girl because it follows author/amateur detective Tim Underhill back to his hometown of Millhaven to solve a new mystery: the disappearance of his young nephew Mark, which is somehow related to a shunned neighborhood house where terrible events took place decades earlier. The particulars of the story will be comfortably familiar to Straub fans, and this short novel is a nice warm-up for its sequel In the Night Room. There, Straub revisits the setting of this book, but on surer footing with a cast of adult characters. ( )