The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I liked The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time because it is simple, fresh and touching. It is simple, because the narrative is easy to follow (being the point of view of Christopher, a teener with autism).

It is fresh, because it apparently begins as a detective novel but ends up being something else. Something smaller and bigger at the same time.

Let me give a bit of the plot (no spoiler here, since this is where the novel starts). Christopher's neighbor's dog is found murdered in Christopher's neighbor's yard. Our hero decides to investigate the curious incident (the title, btw, is taken from one of the lines of Sherlock Holmes) despite being discouraged by his dad.

In the process of his somewhat naive investigation, Christopher uncovers more secrets than he bargained for. Some of the great mystery novels work this way. The murder catalyzes a chain of events that unravel the lives surrounding the murder, often also revealing the frailties of the detectives themselves.

Thus Holmes had his morphine addiction and Hercule Poirot had his vanity and obsessive compulsive disorder (Poirot's battlecry: "Method and Order!")

Christopher's murder is undeniably set on a much smaller and humbler scale: the murder victim is a dog; the detective has autism; and no rich families are under scrutiny -- it's just the lives of working class England.

I couldn't help but feel some poignancy in Christopher's story as he discovers the secrets behind his mother's death, a poignancy that is sometimes absent in other mystery stories in the same tradition. And this is from a simple detective novel?