Changes

The man is carted off in an ambulance, and Cal tries to shrug off the incident but it's not easy. How did the man know his name? How did he know that Cal's father was dead? Who could possibly want to kill a run of the mill adolescent like him? What is the Ormond Singularity that the man kept shouting about? And the thing is, Cal's father had written to him shortly before returning home already in the throes of a fatal illness. His father was vague on detail, but is pretty sure he was on to something big. Could there be a connection?

Only too soon, Call discovers that there is a connection, and a far more dangerous one that he could ever imaginedimagine...

Oh! I really liked this first episode of ''Conspiracy 365''. It's the first in a series of twelve, with each one published monthly thoughout throughout 2010. It's written in the form of a diary and this one, obviously enough, covers January. It comes in at under two hundred pages - the pages are numbered backwards, in homage to the countdown plot device - and it's a real no-nonsense affair. The writing is crisp and sharp, accessible and clear, and we launch straight into the action.

Everyone loves a good conspiracy thriller, and the success of televisionstelevision's Jack Bauer and 24 has shown that there's a big appetite out there for episodic, cliffhanging variations on the theme. ''Conspiracy 365'' buys right into that and does it well. You could see it as a twenty-first -century penny dreadful, I suppose, and it has an honourable tradition behind it. I tend to dislike cliffhanger endings in children's fiction, but when the cliffhanger is the point and the next book is just four weeks away, I make an exception.

If they like the episodic nature of ''Conspiracy 365'', they should look no further than Tim Bowler's outstanding [[Blade: Playing Dead by Tim Bowler|Blade]] series to see just how far and how creatively this kind of thing can be taken. You might also enjoy [[April (Conspiracy 365) by Gabrielle Lord]].