Midnighters, Vol. 2: Touching Darkness, Westerfeld. Yes. Given the amount of research that Westerfeld apparently did for Peeps, I’m disappointed that he didn’t bother to check what the GPS constellation looks like. It’s not entirely clear he knows what the mailbox flag means, either, though maybe the character merely phrased something oddly. There’s mention made of the Scrabble® dictionary, but what he describes sounds more like the wordlist, except that he would have to be talking about the long word list, and he gets that wrong, too. Also, fingerprints, anybody? And finally, there’s an issue that I’m not willing to go back and look at The Secret Hour to verify, but it’s a fairly serious flaw, or cheat, whichever way he handled it (or didn’t) in that book. He hangs a bit of a lantern on it in this volume, which doesn’t soothe my somewhat ripped-off feelings much. Withal, though, the book kept me turning pages. I like what he’s done with the world and the characters, and only wish he had bothered to deal better with a few things.
Update: per his words elsewhere, he got the mailbox flag wrong (“finds bill for [name]”).