Twenty-six-year-old Daniel sees the girl get into a Camaro but doesn't realize until later that he has just witnessed a kidnapping. Until then, we learn about him. We learn he has spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a progressive disease that has robbed him of the power of speech and use of his limbs except for his left hand, which he can use to type. He is able to move about, thanks to a motorized wheelchair. Despite all this, he considers himself lucky, and so he is in the people in his life: his lifelong best friend, Travis, and his caregiver, a woman named Marjami. Both are wonderful, caring people and Daniel is pretty wonderful himself, memorably kind. Self-reliant, he lives by himself and doesn't deserve what is about to happen to him, once the kidnapper, Jonathan, discovers--thanks to Daniel's careless Reddit post--that Daniel has seen the crime. Has Daniel's luck run out? It's rare that a crime novel could be described as lovely but this is a lovely book. Set in Athens, Georgia, the novel is a model of verisimilitude. It is also beautifully written and suspenseful, at the same time being all about goodness and caring without once being sappy or, well, sentimental. And that is a rare feat in fiction.

Deadspin founder Leitch (God Save the Fans) attempts to fuse a thriller onto a hopeful story of a man living with a degenerative disease, with surprisingly bland results. Daniel, 26, who uses a wheelchair and is unable to speak because of his spinal muscular atrophy, lives in the college town of Athens, Ga., where he works from home for a regional airline responding to tweets from angry customers and spends time with his perky Pakistani caretaker, Marjani, and stoner buddy Travis. One morning, he sees a young woman get into a tan Camaro outside his home. He later learns college student Ai-Chin has gone missing and believes he had witnessed Ai-Chin's abduction, then gets way in over his head trying to track down her abductor in a plot combining Daniel, Travis, and Marjani's Hardy Boys--style sleuthing with Daniel's obsessive, increasingly dangerous Reddit posts about Ai-Chin and the Camaro. The thriller plot is weakened by long digressions about the effects of Daniel's disease, frequent musings on subjects such as college football, and the implausibility that Daniel would blithely put himself in harm's way. The well-intentioned portrayal of what it means to live with a degenerative condition fails to compensate for the absence of convincing characters and plot. Readers can safely take a pass. Agent: David Gernert, the Gernert Co. (May)