Who do you trust when all you know are the names on the screen?
Echoes by Laura Tisdall, is a story about a young girl who’s gotten herself tied up in a darker side of life. A dark side that exists entirely in cyber space. That is until it doesn’t.
Mallory Park is a high school student struggling to make ends meet with a younger brother and a ex-military father suffering from PTSD. Mallory escapes her depressing reality by utilizing her mathematical genius hacking up dirt on fortune 500 companies for a man know only as ‘The Asker’ in an exclusive online group called the Forum.
But as hackers start to go missing the only place Mallory’s ever felt free to be herself is threatened. When ‘The Asker’ goes missing, after a cryptic conversation about locating the missing hackers, Mallory feels a push to do something. Something that will shatter the security and bring the darkness kept behind a computer screen into stark reality.
Luckily for Mallory she doesn’t have to do it alone. Another hacker by the name ‘Warden’ flies all the way from California to help Mallory locate their group leader.
At 291 pages this is a rather quick read.
And it will go very fast too. I could not put this book down!
The mystery and plot twists throughout the story are superb. The characters of Mallory and Warden are well developed with individual quirks and flaws that make them both very unique and yet still very relatable.
My only real complaint, as a romance lover, is that there isn’t a romantic sub plot. Maybe a minuscule one between Mallory and Warden but you could blink and miss it.
So if you’re into young adult fiction centered around cyber crimes with a lack of romance and an emphasis on mystery this is definitely the book for you.