Friday, Book Two: On a Cold Winter’s Night

Lancelot Jones, the smartest boy in the world, is dead.  His former partner, Friday Fitzhugh, has spent the following week in bed after finding his dead body in their burning clubhouse.  She just can’t bring herself to face the world after this… until she hears that Lancelot’s death is being ruled an accident.  Friday knows better and that sets her off through the town of King’s Hill to find out what really happened that night.  Though it may be a small town, it hides plenty of secrets and Friday knows exactly where to start looking.  It’s just that the things she finds may not spell trouble for herself, but for her family as well.

“Book One” was a good start to Ed Brubaker and Marcos Martin’s take on what happens when characters from a young adult series grow up and have to deal with the adult world.  Things continue on in that vein for the first two thirds of this volume as Friday grabs this latest investigation as a means of rousing herself from depression.  It’s solid reading on its own terms and I have no doubt that “Book Two” would’ve been decently entertaining had the creators continued along those lines.

Except they didn’t and what happens in the last third will either convince you that the series has already jumped the shark, or taken itself to the next level.  I fall into the latter camp as the supernatural elements of the story were expressly hinted at in the previous volume make themselves fully known here in spectacular fashion.  This is through some excellent work from Martin as the results are at first horrifying, and then kind of trippy.  It all leads to a cliffhanger ending that threatens to turn the story so far right on its head.  Which is to say that the yearly wait between volumes of this series has now leveled up to “excruciating.”