A nice bit of crossover here, with a juvenile mystery that’s also a self-published impossible crime novel easing the transition from Minor Felonies this month to another batch of Adventures in Self-Publishing in November.

The sixth in an on-going series, Homework is Hard, Murder is Easy (2025) by Mike Mains does a great job of bringing you up to speed on the capabilities of its teenage sleuth, Jeffrey Jones — you’ll notice some parallels with The Three investigators herein, Mains being a fan of that series — when a series of break-ins seem to be plaguing people attending performances of the school play, The Mousetrap. Apart from a bizarre moment where Jeffrey spoils the identity of the killer for no good reason, this is a nice introduction to the sort of thinking that Jeffrey does, and it sets up a sting operation that captures the students responsible. So far, so neatly-handled.

If Jeffrey isn’t already an outsider at the school he recently joined…

On their first day of high school last year, [Jeffrey and Pablo had] walked right inside the front entrance and stepped all over the school seal…they were written up and warned never to step on the school seal again. When Jeffrey asked why the seal was on the floor if people weren’t supposed to walk on it, the teacher screamed at him for a good five minutes.

…the attention he draws after this mini-case certainly either isolates him more or draws out some unusual fans. Thankfully he has some good friends around him, Pablo and Marisol, and so is able to turn to them when Ellie Nordstrom approaches him and says that her ex-boyfriend, star football player Bob ‘Ski’ Stawski, has threatened to kill her.

Mains does a good job of exploring the real-world consequences of this — Ellie refuses to talk to them unless they promise ahead of time not to go to the police, but once they know her story how can they possibly justify staying silent and potentially contributing to her death? — and this is just one of a few ways in which the setup here, clearly as much of a fantasy as the Great Detective of yore, remains grounded while also paying homage to detective fiction tropes. It’s a tough line to walk, and Mains navigates it well.

It will surprise no-one then, that Ellie ends up dead in her private pool at a time when Ski is playing football in front of hundreds of people…clearly he has to be behind it, but, like, how? A few nice touches round out the notion that it must be murder (“Wait, she hit her forehead?”) and there’s most certainly a moment where the key idea is dropped right in front of the reader, so again Mains is to be commended for the astute job he’s doing here in playing the game: the essential scheme pretty simple — it would have to be for a book aimed at a younger audience — and the easy thing would be not to tell the audience the key piece of it (he tells you twice, in fact…), but I’m always more of a fan of the reader having a chance to solve things and that’s certainly the case here.

So, as a novel of crime-solving and intelligent reasoning, this already comes recommended. But what’s perhaps more interesting is what Mains does away from the core plot.

See, I’ve read over 150 juvenile mysteries for this blog — hell, I’ve written about that many, so add a solid 10% extra that get read and not written up — and this is the first time that there’s any hint of the protagonist’s home life being, well, hard. Sure, the Five Find-Outers‘s parents might roll their eyes at having Mr. Goon coming around to chastise them for their brood’s actions, or Teddy Fitzroy‘s parents might question whether it’s sensible for their 13 year-old son to go up against people willing to commit (animal-centric) homicide and thefts, but those parents are either kept blissfully unaware or end up coming round to the idea in due course.

Jeffrey Jones’s father, by contrast, is actively hostile about his son’s crime-solving hobby, and with good reason: not least because those thefts at the start of the book see the family targeted by a lawsuit that could actively destroy them financially…and, yeah, that would probably vex the average 2025 parent no end.

His father said, “It’s always one thing or another with this kid… You need to stay out of trouble. You need to grow up.”

It’s a fascinating decision to have these decisions ripple back this way, and it feeds into a general air of cynicism throughout the book which might feel unearned except for that fact that Mains does a superb job of stopping the teenage detective fantasy universe getting too out of hand. Whether it’s considering the fact that the legal system is bent towards those who are able to pay to see things fixed in their favour, a casual realisation that the people around you aren’t necessarily the most desirable in terms of aspiration (c.f. Pablo dismissing the other players on the football team as “children [who are] easily swayed and manipulated”), or even the notion that some adults around you are, like, not the success stories you’re possibly supposed to accept them as…

“He’s one of those guys whose best days were in high school and now he spends all his time wishing he could go back.”

…the idea here that the world doesn’t simply go back to the idealised version you saw before the crime was brought to your attention is kind of revolutionary in this type of fiction. Hell, add in the superbly-described fight late on and the magnificently adroit dismissal of superhero movies on really rather sound ground and what you’ve got here is something decidedly out of the common.

I was drawn to Homework is Hard, Murder is Easy by the banner promise of the two-places-at-once impossible murder, and while I enjoyed that I leave it more with an impression of the hardships in the world that young mind are forced to wake up to. This facet of growing up has, of course, been covered amply in countless books already, but the way Mains stirs it into a fair play detective plot and then lets the threads linger really is kind of superb. If this sort of unexpected fringe considerations are a hallmark of this series, you can bet that you’ll be hearing a lot more about Jeffrey Jones on here in future.