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Review: Guy Langman: Crime Scene Procrastinator by Josh Berk

Title: Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator
Author: Josh Berk
Series: Standalone
Genre: YA Contemporary
Format: Galley
Source: Netgalley
Pub Year: 2/13/2012
Purchase: Amazon/B&N

I received this book free of charge from Netgalley in exchange for an honest opinion.

Blurb from Goodreads:
Guy Langman can’t be bothered with much. But when his friend Anoop wants Guy to join the forensics club with him in the (possibly misguided) hopes of impressing some girls, Guy thinks why not.

They certainly aren’t expecting to find a real dead body on the simulated crime scene they’re assigned to collect evidence from. But after some girlish, undignified screaming, the two realize it is indeed a body. Which means they have stumbled across a real, dead murder victim.

Meanwhile, Guy has been looking into the past of his father—a larger-than-life character who recently passed away. He was much older than Guy’s mom, and had a whole past Guy never even knew about. Could his father’s past and the dead body be linked? Does Guy want to know? He’s going to need all his newfound forensics skills to find out . . .

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I really wanted to read this book. I love CSI and forensic science so the title alone capture me. That being said, it was just a little disappointing to read. Honestly, when I read “dead body” and his father’s past, I thought they were going to be tightly connected. Instead, everything in the book is loosely connected.

Guy Langman is the main character and I’m not liking Guy at all. He has no ambition and is very superficial. He likes Rachel, the pretty girl, only because she is beautiful in his eyes yet I really can’t picture her. He judges Maurice based on her clothing. She is dressing up in black and immediately says she is trying too hard and no one buys into her new gothic look because she is too chipper at times. To me, that is WTF. Just because a person is gothic, doesn’t mean a person can’t be happy; goths are not depressing people, they may enjoyed the morbid aspects of life though. Abby from NCIS is a very happy goth and no one questions whether she is goth or not. She is. Guy grew on me after 150 pages of reading. He became funny and more relatable but still, not the guy for me.

The minor characters are the ones I’m more interested such as Maurice and TK who is constantly doing research. On what? No one really knows but he is doing research. He is just an eccentric guy. Anoop is the best friend of Guy, not a real interesting character. Hairston Danforth III, I felt so bad for him being treated so badly by people. I would have like to know about him but what little I know is enough to captivate me. Jacques Langman, the half-brother of Guy, is someone I wonder if Guy will keep contact with. There was a huge fuss made about him and yet when the truth is revealed, it’s a letdown and kind of sad. I wish he had a bigger role in the book.

WHERE IS MY DEAD BODY? The blurb of this book promised me a dead body during an excursion and it’s not here. Wait, I finally have my dead body on page 139 (Divide 139 by 228 pages, makes it 61 %). At 61% of the book, it’s really late for a dead body to drop. (And this alone drops the book 1 whole butterfly, normally, it’s always half a butterfly that I drop but not this time)

The book is divided into two parts- 1) The Forensic Squad and Guy dealing with his father’s death and 2) Murder and missing treasure coins. To me, there are not jiving together but I guess they do go together by very thin lines. What I did like was the burning of the book Guy was writing. The book seemed more in touch with what Guy was feeling and more connective to him. It was a nice touch to end up burning it for his father.

Not much I can tell you about it. There is a lot of Mom jokes ( that’s not what your mom said last night or that’s what your mom said), boobs, boners, and really horrible jokes that have be explained so they are no longer funny. Guy is sarcastic and he does grow on you (if you don’t like him at first).

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