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Our last day in London, we went up in the London Eye, a/k/a Millennium Wheel. My first exposure to this gigantic observation wheel was in the 2005 come-back episode of Doctor Who, at which point I had no idea it was anything other than your run-of-the-mill Ferris wheel.

The original Ferris wheel, built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, had a 264-foot diameter wheel and 36 cars, each of which could carry a whopping 60 people. Today’s wheel at Navy Pier has a paltry 150-foot diameter. It practically looks like a miniature.

In contrast, the London Eye—built for the turn of the millennium, originally intended to stand five years, but so popular it will remain indefinitely—has a 443-foot diameter. It is freaking huge. Around the wheel are 32 sealed pods, transparent except for the floor, each of which accommodates 25 passengers. It rotates so slowly and smoothly—30 minutes per rotation—that from a distance it appears not to be moving at all. It’s right next to the Thames, across from Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, but you can see for miles in all directions.

This is all to say that when I returned to the library after my vacation and found The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd, on our cart of new books, I was wicked excited.

Aunt Gloria and Cousin Salim are visiting Ted’s family in London for a few days before moving to America. Ted and his older sister, Kat, are expected to entertain Salim. Unfortunately, their very first activity is a bust. Salim gets into a London Eye capsule, and Ted and Kat watch it make its majestic way around. But half an hour later, when the capsule opens, Salim is nowhere in sight.

How could Salim have vanished from a sealed, transparent capsule with so many witnesses? And where has he gone? The police are on the case, but Ted and Kat have a few theories of their own. Will they find Salim before it’s too late?

My usual complaint about middle grade mysteries is that their solutions are either totally obvious from the beginning (at least, to an adult reader) or are completely obscure and fly in from out of nowhere. Where those mysteries fail, The London Eye succeeds, allowing readers to gradually pick up clues throughout the book and formulate reasonable hypotheses along with the characters. Even if readers don’t guess the solution before Ted reveals it, they’ll recognize the pieces were in place all along.

Dowd accomplishes this feat by keeping very close to Ted, driving the novel at least as much by character as by plot. Ted is quirky but likeable, a high-functioning Aspie with a “brain that runs on a different operating system from other people’s.” Like many people with autism spectrum conditions, he has a great eye for detail, a tendency to take everything literally, and difficulty reading people’s emotions. He’s also obsessed with the weather, well-meaning, and a sweet contrast to his prickly (but grudgingly likeable) sister Kat. Throughout the course of the story, Ted exchanges some of his innocence for worldliness, goes out of his comfort zone for Salim’s sake, and makes new friends.

One of my favorite, albeit serious, parts of the book is when Ted’s father goes to the morgue to see if a boy pulled from the river is Salim. Ted is waiting at home. “Something terrible happened in those fifty-four minutes. No amount of making up shipping forecasts could stop me from thinking about it. Death. I realized it was real.” Ted lapses into deep thoughts about his mortality, infinity, and God. I’ll bet you a dollar Frank and Joe Hardy never have.

The London Eye Mystery, being a British mystery with an autistic main character, invites obvious comparisons with Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. In spite of the surface similarities, it’s no rip-off but a solid work in its own right, with an upper middle grade/early YA rather than YA/adult audience. Recommended for boys and girls in middle school and up.