THE QUESTION OF THE MISSING HEAD

Copperman/Cohen introduce a detective who brings something extra to his investigations: Asperger’s syndrome.

Before it was dropped from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Asperger’s was an increasingly popular diagnosis given to people displaying a constellation of behaviors often associated with autism—inflexible thinking, reduced ability to read social cues, constricted range of interest—but whose cognitive and linguistic functioning are generally better than those of autistic folks. So it’s hardly surprising to see a new series whose investigator has Asperger’s—though Samuel Hoenig would be first to insist that his condition is not an affliction; it’s a difference rather than a defect. Samuel was diagnosed at 16 under the old DSM IV, and he wears his Asperger’s as a badge of honor. He constantly marvels at his ability to understand others while maintaining his own idiosyncratic take on the world. And the person he understands the best, other than his beloved mother, is Janet Washburn, a would-be client of Samuel’s question-answering service in Piscataway, New Jersey, called, with typical Asperger logic, Questions Answered. Ms. Washburn, as Samuel prefers to call her, soon proves herself invaluable, smoothing Samuel’s path with other clients, including Marshall Ackerman, chief administrator at Garden State Cryonics Institute. Ackerman wants Samuel to find a misplaced, cryogenically preserved body part, which Samuel agrees to do as soon as Ackerman rephrases his request as a question: “Who stole one of our heads?” The discovery of a body in the cryonic storage chamber—not one of GSCI’s clients, but a staff member—ups the ante, posing a question Samuel may not be equipped to answer.

Copperman, who as Jeff Cohen has written nonfiction (The Asperger Parent, 2002, etc.), tackles a challenging task: presenting the inner life of someone whose inner life is by nature opaque to others. His focus seriously limits Samuel’s power as an effective sleuth rather than a poster-boy for early intervention.