E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus



Wyatt survived Camp Valor, although he lost his friend Dolly to the evil Hallsie. He's determined to take him down, but other missions get in the way. A young gamer, Jalen, gets drawn into a shoot-em-up game that ends up actually killing people, since hackers got into both his virtual reality system and the system of a self driving car. Jalen has to go into hiding, and feels horrible about what happened, so is glad to go to Camp Valor. The hacking threat seems to be an entity called Encyte, and there are several different theories about who this might be, including a gamer who goes by the name Hi Kyto. To make matters even more complicated, a former Valor alum, Darsie, who knew Wyatt's father Eldon wants Wyatt to drop out of Valor and work for him to find Hallsie. He also is interested in the Encyte threat, and has resources that might help with that. In the meantime, the secretary of defense, Elain Becker, finds out about Camp Valor and is determined to shut it down. Interestingly, Hi Kyto is his protege. Eventually, the people at the camp have a woman come to them and say she has been approached to shoot a private school where the children of a gun rights advocate attend, and all of the threads in the Encyte mystery get tangled up in the attempt to stage this convincingly and finally put this threat out of commission.

Strengths: There are relatively few books that involve video gaming, and this uses it to wickedly good effect. Camp Valor, where juvenile delinquents gets a second chance by working for the government, is such an appealing idea to the middle grade mind. This has lots of technology details, travel, things blowing up-- it's not slow at all. Look at that cover-- it sells itself to Klavan's The Last Thing I Remember, Gilman's The Devil's Breath and Kincaid's Insignia.
Weaknesses: This is rather technical, has some fairly gruesome violence, and was a bit difficult to follow because there were so many intriguing things going on.
What I really think: I wish there weren't the f-bomb near the end of the book, and this is still a bit more violent than I like, but it's a really good spy mystery, especially with the connection to gaming and the Internet of Things. Reminded me a bit of Falkner's Brain Jack. The first book has been really popular with my 8th graders, who will be waiting breathlessly for this volume to arrive. This would be a fantastic series for high school readers who loved Stormbreaker.

I think I liked the Trigger Mechanism better than the first Camp Valor novel. These books are wonderful military adventure tales for teens. It's great that Scott McEwen and Hof Williams are filling this void in young adult novels and filling it so adroitly.