Review: Conspiracy 365: June by Gabrielle Lord

Conspiracy 365: June by Gabrielle Lord (June 2010, Hodder Children's Books, ISBN: 0340996498)

First Lines:

1 June
214 days to go...

Big River State Forest
12.00 am

Everything fizzed and flickered out.

Review: June is the sixth in the Conspiracy 365 series in which a new book comes out at the beginning of every month for a whole year. I reviewed January a few months ago and I'm still reading and enjoying this series.

Slight spoilers for the earlier books may follow:

Fifteen-year-old Cal Ormond is on the run. He's suspected of hurting members of his family and two sets of criminals are after him and he has to stay alive for 365 days. It's all to do with the 'Ormond Singularity' but what that is, Cal nor the reader yet knows. Connected to the Singularity are others things called Ormond: the Ormond Angel, the Ormond Riddle and most recently, the Ormond Jewel. January set the premise of the series up and since then Cal has been in multiple scrapes and life-threatening situations and it was only in May that he began to get some information together about what's going on and discover how the bad guys always knew where he was.

After a trip into the countryside in May, June finds him returning home to the city and getting help from his best friend Boges and Winter, the ward of one of the criminals after him. He's not sure if he can trust her as she's very mysterious but she has saved his life before. Some familiar, friendly, faces from earlier books also reappear.

Most of the story is action but each book begins with a recap of the previous month and Cal usually tells his story to one of the characters in the current book so I don't think it would be too hard to pick-up the story if you began this series part-way through the year.

Conspiracy 365 is an action-packed series which should appeal to fans of thrillers. Each book ends on a cliff-hanger which makes you desperate to read the next one. The underlying mystery of the Ormond family, is slowly coming together and next month, July, it's Cal's birthday which is a significant one, so I imagine the baddies won't hold back on trying to find him.