So You Want To Be A Crime Scene Investigator
by Linda Soules
BEST OPENING LINES BOOKY
The judge's reasoning
Linda Soules is doing something genuinely difficult here, and she's doing it well: writing non-fiction for middle-grade readers in prose that neither condescends nor decorates. The voice throughout So You Want To Be A Crime Scene Investigator is lucid, warm, and consistently earned — sentences that carry real weight without straining for it.
Consider the opening hook: "You might imagine walking into a room that's trying to tell you a story. A chair is tipped over. A glass is broken. A window is open that should be closed." That's three short declarative beats that do genuine scene-setting work — they put the reader inside the job before a single credential has been mentioned. The prose knows exactly where it is.
The book's most impressive sustained move is its commitment to specificity over generality. When Soules explains forensic science, she doesn't gesture at it — she lands: "Science doesn't lie, and science doesn't misremember, and science doesn't get nervous on the witness stand." That's a sentence a ten-year-old will remember, and it's also philosophically precise. The Frances Glessner Lee section — "hand-knitted miniature stockings on tiny figures, each posed exactly as the real victim had been found" — earns its historical freight by being concrete rather than reverential.
The Author's Note closes the book with a quietly beautiful passage about the profession's unglamorous nobility: "There is a person on her knees in the dark at 3 AM photographing a doorframe, and her name will not appear in the news." That's not career-guide writing. That's a writer who cares about her subject and trusts her reader to feel why it matters. For a middle-grade non-fiction series title, that's the highest standard — and this book meets it.
Judged by Brooke Hayes — Reader-at-Large · Cross-Genre · Emerging Voices
"Every book is the only book for somebody."
Supporting passages
"Science doesn't lie, and science doesn't misremember, and science doesn't get nervous on the witness stand. Science just tells you what it found. Every piece of evidence is science wearing a disguise — and a CSI's whole job is to pull off the mask."
The rhetorical triplet followed by a single clarifying image is exactly calibrated for a middle-grade reader: memorable rhythm, zero condescension, and a metaphor that earns its place.
"Somewhere in a courthouse, somewhere in a family's living room, somewhere in a cell where an innocent person is waiting, the truth matters. It matters more than almost anything. It changes lives."
This is the book doing what the best career non-fiction for young readers does — anchoring vocational information to genuine moral stakes, so the reader feels the weight of the work, not just its mechanics.
"There is a person on her knees in the dark at 3 AM photographing a doorframe, and her name will not appear in the news. Years from now, somebody might walk out of a courtroom free because of what she found, and she will probably never meet them."
The Author's Note closes on this image rather than a career-guide summary, and the choice reveals a writer who understands that the best non-fiction for children earns its meaning through the particular, not the general.
Per-axis rubric scores
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