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A priceless painting stolen. A plot to overthrow the government overheard. A murder witnessed. What's a teenager to do?
If she's a heroine in one of Ally Carter's books, reporting a crisis to the authorities and getting back to homework is never the solution.
"That is a very boring book," says Carter, who released "See How They Run," the second novel in her Embassy Row series, last month. Carter's newest YA thriller series, which started with last year's "All Fall Down," contains all of the not-boring elements that are her hallmarks: secrets, spying, murder, mystery, betrayal — all with international implications and all handled by a teenage protagonist.
The granddaughter of the U.S. diplomat to Adria, 16-year-old Grace came back to the fictional country unwillingly. She witnessed her mother's death three years before and remained convinced it was a murder despite the worried and sometimes frustrated insistence of her family and doctors. And so when she saw the man who'd killed her mother that night in Adria, Grace took matters into her own hands.
By the start of "See How They Run," she's been proven right — partially. But she's also reeling after being forced to confront a horrifying, long-buried piece of her past. And the people around her — the adults she's supposed to trust and the friends who are supposed to be on her side — are definitely still not as they seem.
Grace's decisions come with objectively larger consequences than those made by most any Utah teen — a quarrel with the boy next door could lead to war, because the boy next door has grown up in the Russian embassy. But anyone who's ever been a teenager can relate to the frustration of not being trusted because of age or experience, or the pain of discovering your best friend has been lying to you.
"In my very first book, 'I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have to Kill You' — about a girl who goes to a boarding school for spies — there's the line, 'Turns out being a girl is the tricky part,' " Carter says. "And I think that that's something that always is a recurring theme with everything I write. It doesn't matter how much training you have, what kind of life you've grown up in; those touchstone moments are really sort of universal. It doesn't matter if you're Prince Harry or Joe the plumber's kid."
Carter's best-selling Gallagher Girls — about the aforementioned spy school — and Heist Society series also center on teen girls with the weight of the world (or the family's art-thieving legacy, in the case of Heist Society) on their shoulders. She grew up in Oklahoma reading Nancy Drew, and it never entered her mind to focus on "any other type of character" than strong young women, she said. "I really just wanted to write books like I wish I had had as a teen reader."
Like Nancy Drew, but armed with 21st-century technology and facing (usually) less-antiquated gender stereotypes, Carter's heroines get themselves into and out of scrapes, often joined by a ragtag group of quirky friends capable of both witty banter and espionage.
A full-time writer since 2007, when she started writing two series at the same time, Carter now is working on the third Embassy Row book, likely out at the end of the year. Gallagher Girls wrapped up in 2013, but she hopes to get back to Heist Society someday, describing it as a series "I've always thought I'd work on for the rest of my career."
Though she has a suspicious amount of knowledge about how to spy and get away with crimes, Carter says she doesn't spend much time on research beyond "the broad strokes." She did mine CIA training books for the curriculum of Gallagher Academy, where the teens are taught what to look for when going through someone's trash, or graded on whether they can follow a trained operative without the operative realizing it. Beyond that, though, the worlds are mostly her creations — mixed with cultural assumptions about the lives of spies, wacky criminals and political leaders. "What I've learned is that people aren't going to judge you on how spies really live; they're going to judge you on how pop culture has taught them spies live," she says. So in Carter's Adria, diplomats live in mansionlike embassies and their schedules are filled with black-tie parties instead of piles of paperwork and long meetings.
"I'm the first to say, if you're an ambassador's kid, you're not going to be impressed with Embassy Row. I'm really sorry," Carter says, with a laugh.
What might be lacking in reality is more than made up for in page-turning fun. But though her tightly paced thrillers can be gulped down in a day, easy reading doesn't mean easy writing, Carter notes, and writing for young adults doesn't mean pandering to an uneducated audience with no taste.
"Teens for the most part read purely for pleasure. They do enough reading for school and assignments and things that if they're going to sit down on their free time, it's going to be something just for the sheer love of it," she says. That means teens are often much pickier than adults who feel obligated to read the latest literary award-winner.
"Several years ago, there was a big phenomenon adult book that everybody was talking about. A friend said, 'Oh you have to read it, it gets really good after page 150,' " Carter says. "I just thought, there is no way any teenager is going to sit through 149 boring pages. … That's unique to writing for teens, and that is why I'm drawn to writing for teens.
"It's a lot of fun to write for people who just read for joy."
Twitter: @racheltachel —
See how she reads
Ally Carter will read from and sign "See How They Run."
When • Monday, 7 p.m.
Where • The King's English Bookshop, 1511 S. 1500 East, Salt Lake City
Admission • Places in the signing line are reserved for those who purchase a copy of "See How They Run" from The King's English.
Info • kingsenglish.com or allycarter.com