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Nineteen-year-old Ed Kennedy lives in a shack with an aging, flatulent dog. He’s in love with his friend Audrey but can’t bring himself to tell her. The highlight of his week is playing cards with three other friends as directionless as he. After Ed becomes an unlikely hero during a bank robbery,, Ed finds an ace of diamonds in his mailbox. On it are written three addresses, each followed by a time of day. At the first address at the appointed time, Ed sees a man come arrive home. Then he hears a woman being brutalized inside. A small child comes out and huddles on the porch, more numb than fearful: clearly this has happened before. At the second address, an elderly woman thinks Ed is her young love, Johnny. At the third address, Ed sees a teenage girl leave her house and go for a run. She is shoeless. Clearly, someone wants Ed to do something about each of these situations . . . but what should he do? And who is that someone? Australian author Markus Zusak’s remarkable novel is provocative, funny, disturbing, tender, hopeful, and, above all, gutsy. Zusak's story that challenges readers to think about what is ethical, what is moral, and what is right and about the ways the answers to these questions are far from clear. Each time Ed makes his way--sometimes by instinct, sometimes by agony--to a decision , there is only a brief respite before another ace arrives--four in all. Each one raises the stakes on the question of who is the sender, and why he or she has chosen Ed to not only bear witness to the lives around him but make a difference in them. Brilliantly constructed, the novel moves closer and closer to the answer by working its way toward the center of the circle that is Ed’s own life. The identity of the sender has Ed having to defend his very existence. He does so with courage, lust, and defiance, embracing the life he once merely let happen in this unforgettable novel. ©2006 Cooperative Children’s Book Center