With increasing public and media attention being paid to missing children, it was inevitable that some savvy writer would mine the topic's potential for youth fiction. Sure enough, Daniel E. Parker and Barnabas Miller have written a series of novels that present themselves as installments of a 16 year-old boy's diary as he searches for his friend, Alice Brown, who has vanished. The authors' pretense that "Tom Sinclair," his diary and the endangered "Alice Brown" are real is maintained throughout, even on the dust jackets. Here's one:

"We discovered the story of Alice's disappearance by accident when we came upon Tom Sinclair's website --- watchingalice.com - a site dedicated entirely to Tom's search for Alice.  We are convinced that the more people who read this journal, the better Tom's chances are of finding Alice. Please read this journal.  Please go to watchingalice.com.

You could help save Alice Brown's life. "

Of course, the authors, not "Tom," write the website, which has recently been changed to www.alicebrownismissing.com. It, like its predecessor, makes no mention of the fact that Alice is not a real person, is not in peril, and that their appeals are really just a marketing device to snag unwary teens. True, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the home page, past old entries on "Tom's" journal, you will see in tiny type the legend, "For entertainment purposes only." This is presumably intended for any 15 year-olds who have been to law school and understand about disclaimers.

The website is over the line. Seeking book sales by pleading to potential customers that reading a book may save the life of a fictional missing child is bad enough, but using this technique to fool young readers is really shameless. And they are fooled. The only way that a young reader would know that Alice's plight is fiction would be the "fiction" sign in the bookstore or library, if they noticed it and if that's where they found the book. On the website, there are only clues. The Scoreboard has confirmed instances where unusually astute teens have assumed that Alice Brown is not just missing, but also alive.

Products should not be marketed to children using such sharp practices; indeed, the Scoreboard doesn't think websites that market fictional movies to adults by pretending they are real (such as "The Godsend" and "The Blair Witch Project") are appropriate either. Call it the James Frey Rule: if writers can't interest people in their story when they know its fiction, pretending that it's true is not an ethical alternative.

See unethical sites from other months