Jacob, arriving for an appointment with Jess, finds her body and expertly sets up a crime scene to focus suspicion on Mark. Her loutish boyfriend Mark had been observed quarreling with her earlier. Theo enters a home where, unbeknownst to him, Jess is housesitting, and flees after surprising her in the shower. Circumstances converge, resulting in the death, from blunt head trauma, of Jacob’s tutor, Jess, a college student. Theo, now 15, resents the oxygen sucked out of his family life by Jacob and, yearning to observe “normal” domesticity, has begun breaking into homes. Jacob’s father fled the chaotic household after Jacob knocked his younger brother Theo’s highchair over, wounding the infant. His mother, Emma, is a financially struggling, part-time advice columnist. He’s created his own forensics lab in his bedroom, and, alerted by a police scanner, has snuck out at night to “crash” crime scenes in his small Vermont hometown. Usually, Jacob beats the CrimeBusters cast to a solution of each episode’s mystery by about 20 minutes. Jacob’s life centers around a CSI-esque TV show called CrimeBusters, which he must watch each afternoon as punctiliously as Rain Man watches Wapner. Highly verbal and analytical, but flummoxed by the most ordinary social interactions, Jacob negotiates a world fraught with terrors by adhering to a rigid set of rules and calming rituals. Jacob, now 18, first exhibited signs of Asperger’s syndrome at three, shortly after his first vaccination series. A young autistic man obsessed with criminology is charged with the murder of his tutor, in Picoult’s suspenseful but anticlimactic latest ( Handle with Care, 2009, etc.).

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