Justice

Gr 4–7—"What happened next happened fast," the narrator says at one point, which aptly sums up the pace of this sequel to Salane's Lawless (Scholastic, 2013). The story picks up the action just after the close of the previous book as adolescent master criminal M Freeman is held captive inside the sprawling hideout of the Fulbrights, a disciplined team of vigilantes and arch-rivals of her own Lawless School. Here, M and her Lawless classmates are fitted for ultra high-tech battle suits and forced through a grueling series of tests, preparation for a dangerous mission kept secret from them. When M hatches a scheme to break out her mother, imprisoned on an upper floor, readers are vaulted on an urgent trip to a Soviet-era stadium outside Prague, the British Museum in London, and a secret apartment in Manhattan. Stolen art, moon rocks, medieval alchemy, and a lesser-known text by Geoffrey Chaucer all tie into a snowballing plot by the Fulbright leader to engineer a perfect human. Speculative technology elements are often thought-provoking. Though the narrative sometimes veers into the absurd, plot twists and vivid suspense effectively keep readers on edge. The cast here is large, and loyalties are often in question, so this volume is better understood after reading Lawless. A sudden dark turn and a cliff-hanger ending suggest another book is on the way.