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Behind the Curtain is the second of Peter Abrahams's Echo Falls mysteries, his YA series with a teenage detective named Ingrid Levin-Hill, and it is the book where the series settles into its full register. Ingrid, a soccer-playing eighth-grader with a taste for Sherlock Holmes, gets pulled into investigating a suspicious gym injury and a fellow student's disappearance that the local police are quietly underplaying.
Abrahams writes Ingrid with the kind of careful interior life that the YA form requires and that adult crime writers often fumble. She is smart without being precocious. The family material (her father's shaky business, her mother's career frustrations, her older brother's drift) carries adult weight underneath the teenage mystery.
Four stars. A genuinely thoughtful YA crime series. Recommended to teen readers and to adults who want their YA mystery serious rather than cute.
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