Cameron Miller is the abused and frightened 14 year-old son of a serial killer. His father, who preyed on young boys, has just been killed in a police shoot-out. Cameron comes forward to the cops and claims to be Neil Lacey, one of his father’s dead victims abducted six years ago. He looks enough like Neil to be a possible match. This is his chance to reinvent himself and get accepted into a loving and rich family – provided he can continue to trick Mr. and Mrs. Lacey into thinking he’s their long-lost son.

It’s a shocking premise, but Cameron is not the con-artist he sounds. The poor kid has no self-esteem. He’s not a great reader and has been kept back at school. He feels tremendous guilt over what he plans to do. You get the feeling it is a matter of survival for him.

Whenever his father had a new victim to sexually and physically abuse, he would lock Cameron out of the way in the reeking cellar where the dead victims were buried in the dirt floor. Cameron shut out the sounds of the torture he was unable to prevent by immersing himself in newspaper clippings that his father kept in a file cabinet. The clippings documented his father’s victims. He studied Neil Lacey’s life in preparation for his eventual escape.

(All this is grim but handled sensitively in Cameron’s thoughts without resorting to graphic images.)

The cops are suspicious, especially an over-the-top Detective Simmons. But Mr. and Mrs. Lacey are overjoyed at the news of their “found” son, and whisk him back to their wealthy home overlooking a lake where the family often enjoys sailing. It helps Cameron that Mr. Lacey is a lawyer with an aristocratic disdain for the police who refuses their urgings to run a test on Cameron’s DNA.

However, Cameron’s “siblings” also distrust him. Nine year-old Stevie is too young to remember his abducted brother Neil. Even so, he has a weird feeling about Cameron and tests him relentlessly by asking him riddles that the family enjoys. He waits with narrowed eyes for Cameron to cough up the correct answers. Thirteen year-old Diana sees right through Cameron. She has no proof to bring to her parents, but she interrogates him whenever they are alone: who are you? What do you want with my family?

At first Diana and Stevie seem the worst brats on earth, harassing their poor brother back from his unimaginable ordeal. Then you realize that Neil was a jerk who pushed them around. Even worse, Mr. and Mrs. Lacey favored Neil then, and are going to great lengths to favor him (Cameron) now. Diana and Stevie feel unjustly shoved aside.

This is where the book gets better than average. Diana and Stevie threaten Cameron’s plan – and neither he nor we the readers can blame them. Plus Diana finds herself liking Cameron far better than her missing brother Neil, and tells him so. According to her, Cameron is quiet and considerate whereas Neil was a bully with an obnoxious sense of entitlement.

So now Cameron struggles with guilt and his complex relationship with Diana and Stevie whom he can’t help liking. Every exhausting day he must stay a step ahead of his “parents” and deduce through keen observation things he should have “remembered” such as Neil’s mannerisms and preferences. Plus that fanatical Detective Simmons is keeping an eye on him, waiting for him to slip up.

Then an evil man from Cameron’s past shows up and threatens his new family! Should Cameron confess who he really is to ensure their safety? Or can he handle things on his own?

Counterfeit Son is a fast and fluid read that won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Mystery Novel, and you can find it on Amazon through the following link: Counterfeit Son