The creation of a mass murderer!

Peter Houghton would hardly be considered a typical seventeen year old teenager. Because one morning, he loaded his backpack with four guns, went to school and killed nine students and a teacher.

Jodi Picoult's enthralling best-selling novel "Nineteen Minutes", titled to portray the astonishingly brief period of time that Houghton took to complete his brutal spree, examines the genesis of that event and the people affected by it from every conceivable perspective - families, victims, survivors, witnesses, parents, friends, police and the law.

Picoult expertly examines a myriad of issues that we find in our headlines day after day - teenage angst; "in" crowds; drug use; bullying; teen sexuality; peer pressure; privacy; parenting - and creates a gripping fictionalized version of a tragic event that no thinking reader could possibly put down. At the end of this astonishing tale, many readers will actually feel sympathy for a convicted mass murderer. Certainly many also will not but, at the end of the day, all readers will realize that Picoult's amazing ability to present an issue from a wide variety of perspectives without herself being judgmental will at least give readers an understanding as to how such a horrific tragedy might come to pass!

Many potential readers may have heard the criticism of the endings of Picoult's novels. Somewhat out of character and different in flavour than the entire novel that led up to it, the ending for "Nineteen Minutes" is certainly not exempt from this criticism. While it is somewhat Hollywood in nature, it provides a twist ending that will snap the reader's eyelids wide open. Maybe it was a little too pat, maybe it wasn't ... but at the very least, it will provide a whole new layer of provocative thought that will keep the reader puzzling over the issues that Picoult raises for a long, long time after the last page closes.

Highly recommended.

By the way ... if you are a potential male reader, you may have avoided Jodi Picoult's work because you have her mentally categorized as a chick lit author. Let me tell you in no uncertain terms that "Nineteen Minutes" is NOT chick lit and male, female, young or old, married or single, parent or childless, you will find this novel absolutely gripping.