She has written one book for adults: Creating Characters Kids Will Love.
Her fiction and nonfiction books for youngsters from beginning readers through teenagers have been selected for Bank Street College lists, TAYSHAS lists, VOYA Top Shelf lists, and 20 Children's Choice state award lists. She is a winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Mystery ( Counterfeit Son), the ForeWard Book of the Year Award for Young Adult Fiction (The Perfect Shot), the Society of Midland Authors Children's Fiction Award and Young Hoosier Book Award ( Ghost Soldier, also an Edgar Award nominee), the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Award ( Dinosaur Hunter), two Society of Children's Writers and Illustrators Magazine Merit Awards, and the Virginia State Reading Association Award ( The Ghost Cadet). (Sept.Elaine Marie Alphin lives out her dream job of writing for children and young adults, and speaking to them at schools and conferences.
Though Alphin races through the conflicts a little too quickly, she achieves a neat and happy ending readers will be enthralled by her suspenseful plot.
The author's treatment of each character's psychological wounds is also impressive, and she doesn't skirt the subject of DNA testing or other forensic refutation of Cameron's identity. The tensions accelerate to a fever pitch when Pop's accomplice Cougar shows up, threatening to unmask him if Cameron doesn't cooperate with Cougar's crimes. He chokes down Neil's favorite meals and fumbles for the answers to old family riddles, all the time observed by his hostile sister, who resents the effect that Neil's disappearance and rediscovery has had on their parents. Alphin (Tournament of Time) builds the pressure masterfully, describing Cameron's constant fear of being found out by the Laceys or the suspicious police detective. Cameron, seeing a chance at a normal life, decides to pass himself off as one of Pop's murder victims and claims he is Neil Lacey, missing for six years. As this gripping novel opens, the police have finally raided his Tennessee home and fatally shot Pop. Cameron Miller's Pop locked him in the cellar while he beat to death the boys he kidnapped-more than 20 boys over the years and Cameron, too, has suffered at his father's hands.
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