He's always showing up at crime scenes, thanks to the police scanner he keeps in his room, and telling the cops what they need to do. If someone else takes a bite of my food, I have to cut off the part that their saliva has touched before I can eat any more of it.

He’d note the footprints in the snow – one set that matches the lone sneaker on the victim’s foot, and the other set that has been matched to the jogger who found the body. Their mom drives a green Toyota van and their dad must be some kind of doctor, because twice now, I’ve seen him come home from work wearing scrubs. But then Jacob showed up in the caf one day because he’d finished his math packet in some freakishly short amount of time and his teacher had dismissed him, and of course he made a beeline for me.On episode 26 of Season Two, the whole CrimeBusters team got hauled up to Mount Washington to investigate a naked guy who was found at the summit. He then yapped for ten straight minutes about the Connecticut pathologist who’d worked on major cases like OJ Simpson and Scott Peterson and Elizabeth Smart. The other fourteen are on my chin, from Christmas 2003, when I got so excited about some stupid gift that I crumpled the wrapping paper, and Jacob went ballistic at the sound. Wayne Nussbaum went to clown college before getting his medical degree, although I haven’t seen the guy crack a smile in the fifteen years I’ve been on the job.

Hey Dad,” I say out loud, pretending that I have a real father instead of just a guilty sperm donor who sends a check every month. One mother told me that she’d read AS kids should carry a card in their wallets, stating that they have autism.It’s almost as if the skin’s been rubbed off raw instead of scratched, and there’s no trauma to the forearms. Five voices tell the tale: Jacob’s own; his brother, Theo’s; his mother, Emma’s; his lawyer, Oliver’s; and the investigating police officer, Rich’s.

I complain a lot about present tense writing, but Picoult is one of the few who can do it so well that I barely even notice it. Or that the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton – a hadrosaur - was found in 1858 in New Jersey?How might it be different without certain plot elements, such as Jacob’s love of forensics or Emma’s single mother status, or Oliver’s professional inexperience?