- Title:
- Disruption: The Cambridge Files: Book 1
- By:
- Steven Whibley
- Pages:
- 338
- Rating:
- 5
At fourteen, Matt Cambridge has executed so many pranks – the latest nearly destroying his school – that his parents are out of discipline options. So his father pulls a few questionable strings to get his son into Camp Friendship: A camp that promises to strengthen the moral compass of today’s youth. With a name like Camp Friendship Matt imagines three punishing weeks of daisy chains and Kumbayas.
Within minutes of arriving at the camp, however, Matt’s nearly killed–twice. It doesn’t take long for him to realize there’s more to this picture-perfect place than meets the eye. What sort of summer camp has programs in forging passports? Why do they have endless fight training, and weapons drills, and what is with the hidden rooms? Matt wonders if his parents realize they’ve enrolled him in what seems to be some kind of freakish, elite spy school.
What Matt doesn’t yet know – and is soon to find out – is that Camp Friendship’s ultimate purpose is far more sinister than he could possibly have imagined. With each dot he connects, he begins to understand that in the end he’ll be left with two choices: pull the prank of a lifetime to escape this place…or die trying.
This is one of the best younger teen spy stories I have ever read. It crackles along at a great pace. Chapters 10 and 36 were particularly gripping for me, but the whole story was superbly written and flowed amazingly well.
Easily on par with the YA work of Chris Ryan, Eoin Colfer or Anthony Horowitz, joining the annals of Mark A Cooper and Thomas E Sniegoski in that niche, Whibley is setting up a most wonderful, thrilling series that any teen worth his age in action points would do well to jump on before it shoots off on to the big screen as an epic action movie.