LOST BOY

Matt Lanchester, biking on a country road near his new home in Wales, believes that he was nearly killed after he experiences a supernatural accident with a phantom speeding car. This incident is identical to the real accident that left a boy dead on the same spot years before. Matt’s encounter with a crude shrine that bears the victim’s initials—the same as Matt’s—leads to further revelations: He feels a mystical connection between the victim, Martin Lloyd, and himself; and it seems as if Martin wants Matt to learn the truth about his death. There are several “lost boys” here—Martin, the roadside casualty, and a child who succumbed after losing his way on a mountaintop a century ago and whose death and his dog’s valiant efforts to find him have become the stuff of local legend. Matt’s lost, too: He’s trying to discover truths about the present by making sense of the past. He’s also navigating friendships, including a tenuous one with a pair of toughs who’ve wrongly accused an elderly, mentally confused townsman of being Martin’s killer. The author fairly successfully interweaves contemporary events with the past and reality with the mystical to frame a mildly engaging story. (Fiction. 10-13)