Colin Fischer

Colin Fischer is the fourteen-year-old protagonist of this eponymous novel. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a disability on the autism spectrum, but he is high-functioning and very smart, beginning high school with the aid of an assistant for the first time. Colin cannot read social cues and facial expressions and is often awkwardly blunt. He handles things like being bullied or teased with little emotional reaction, just as he has little use for loving outpourings from his parents - he hates being touched, even by people he knows. Colin's heroes are people like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Spock - bastions of logic and rational thinking. Everything he sees makes him curious and determined to investigate it further, which is how he gets involved in determining who really had the gun in the cafeteria - his observations prove to him it was not Wayne. Colin is not motivated by...