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)

The lone witness to an abduction tries to get skeptical police--and a skeptical society--to see past his wheelchair. Like most residents of Athens, Georgia, 26-year-old Daniel looks forward to the escape of Game Week, when the University of Georgia plays football at home. Unlike most of them, however, Daniel has spinal muscular atrophy, a progressive genetic disorder that attacks the body from the core out. He can still move his left hand, which he uses to operate his wheelchair and type on an iPad that interfaces with his voice speaker and allows him to work on social media for a commuter airline. One morning Daniel sees a familiar young woman climb into a tan Camaro. After she's reported missing, he posts what he saw on Reddit and begins an email exchange with someone claiming to be the car's driver. The members of a well-drawn, if spare, cast play supporting roles--Marjani, Daniel's overworked caregiver; Travis, his lifelong best friend, who's "like a stoner Ichabod Crane"; Jennifer, the grad student who is "suddenly the matriarch of this weird little family"--but the story belongs to Daniel. He's funny, often self-deprecating, and cleareyed about how many people perceive "someone who doesn't seem to have control of any element of his body," but he wants people to "remember there's a person in here." Leitch, who is abled, drew inspiration from his young son's friend who was diagnosed with SMA as a toddler, and the best parts of the book are the reflective, informative passages when Daniel is discussing his ever evolving relationship with his condition. The resolution of the mystery is neither surprising nor terribly realistic, but it's not really the point here. A lightweight thriller contours an earnest, sincere portrait of a hero whom many insist on seeing as a victim. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.