Genre: YA Detective
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Description (taken from Mary Elizabeth Summer's website):
Fans of Ally Carter’s Heist Society novels will love this teen mystery/thriller with sarcastic wit, a hint of romance, and Ocean’s Eleven–inspired action.
Julep Dupree tells lies. A lot of them. She’s a con artist, a master of disguise, and a sophomore at Chicago’s swanky St. Agatha High, where her father, an old-school grifter with a weakness for the ponies, sends her to so she can learn to mingle with the upper crust. For extra spending money Julep doesn’t rely on her dad—she runs petty scams for her classmates while dodging the dean of students and maintaining an A+ (okay, A-) average.
But when she comes home one day to a ransacked apartment and her father gone, Julep’s carefully laid plans for an expenses-paid golden ticket to Yale start to unravel. Even with help from St. Agatha’s resident Prince Charming, Tyler Richland, and her loyal hacker sidekick, Sam, Julep struggles to trace her dad’s trail of clues through a maze of creepy stalkers, hit attempts, family secrets, and worse, the threat of foster care. With everything she has at stake, Julep’s in way over her head . . . but that’s not going to stop her from using every trick in the book to find her dad before his mark finds her. Because that would be criminal.
Julep is the daughter of one of the best grifters out there. And he's placed her in an uppity school to help her get an in with the rich ones (because it's all about who you know). But when her father mysteriously disappears, Julep must pick up his last job to figure out what happened to him.
Julep is your typical teenage grifter who can get away with a lot of things. While helping a classmate pull a con over her mother and trying to survive high school, she comes home to an empty and ransacked house. Something must have happened to him because of his last job. But in order to figure out what happened, Julep must pick up clues from the pieces left behind. But when the school jock wants to get involved with Julep's life, things just get a little messier. And as Julep slowly pieces together what happened, she finds herself in trouble with some powerful people.
This was an easy story to follow that seemed to flow from start to finish. You get to meet a lot of fun characters and watch how deception pans out. While Julep's personality and the boy crush certainly got an eye roll from me, I was focused on the story. And while I did have some small things figured out, I was still following the story. But back to the romance, it was kind of cheesy. But the good kind of cheesy I guess.
For those interested in a whodunnit story from the point of view of a thief/grifter, this would be the one to grab. Just don't think too hard about the fact that she's only 16.
It's too bad that this wasn't a better read. I've been seeing a lot of "fans of Ally Carter’s Heist Society will like this read". It's also no fun when a YA book feels unrealistic because of the age. But great review!
ReplyDeleteKim @ YA Asylum