The Missing Passenger

Author: Jack Heath
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Jarli only narrowly escaped death after his world-shattering app made him infamous. Now there’s a new foe afoot and Jarli is far from safe in this thrilling sequel to The Truth App. When a seemingly unoccupied plane crash lands in the middle of Kelton, Jarli’s attempts to lay low and out of Viper’s criminal crosshairs crash lands along with it. The cause of the accident is a mystery until his Truth App uncovers a dangerous secret at the crash site—a secret Viper will do anything to keep buried. Suddenly Jarli is a target again and on the run with his high school tormentor, Doug. There’s no one he can trust, not even the police—and Jarli’s starting to think Doug is hiding something, too. Constantly at odds and left with no other choice, they team up to conduct an investigation of their own. But when Doug’s past comes back to haunt them, Jarli fears that there’s little hope in getting out of this one alive. Kelton was supposed to be the perfect hiding place. But there’s no hiding from the truth.

This second in the Liars Book series is at least as tense and entertaining as The Truth App. Although it’s possible to read this one as a standalone (given that references to events in the first book are brief and clarifying), it would be better to read them both, in order, given that this one builds on the action and characters of the first.

The writing is great, and I enjoy the bits of humour sprinkled in.

Scanner ripped Jarli’s shirt open. Parts of the fabric had frozen and stuck to his skin. It felt like a thousand Band-Aids getting pulled off at once. But Jarli couldn’t breathe well enough to scream. Scanner put a blanket over Jarli. It was rough, stiff, and heavy. A fire blanket. “Keep him warm” he said. “The police will be here any minute. When they arrive, it’s important that you don’t tell them about me.”

For two days, nothing much happened. Kirstie posted a theory on social media that Jarli had been abducted by aliens, and that his sudden frostbite could only have come from exposure to the vacuum of space. She got some enthusiastic comments from some very sketchy people, and then Mum and Dad made her delete the post.

As for fans of high-tech, here’s an example of the author skillfully weaving together that aspect with his trademark thriller plotting:

Jarli still couldn’t figure out why the virus had deleted everything on the control room computer. That shouldn’t have happened. But his plan had worked. The virus had transmitted hundreds of hours of footage to the server in India. Hacking it was easier than Jarli had expected. It used a proxy server, but Jarli could break through by overloading the proxy with requests from a shell script. And they had a tough firewall, but the [virus] was permitted to bypass it in order to deliver stolen files to them.

So Jarli had modified the virus. He’d changed the destination IP address so the files would be sent to his computer, rather than to India. Then he’d sent the virus back to them. The Indian hacker had been burgled by his own virus.

Jarli was thrilled with his own cleverness, but he couldn’t tell anyone about it. What he had done was probably illegal.

-P.W.