Chase

by Linwood Barclay

Published 11 July 2017
The Incredible Journey meets Gordon Korman's On the Run in this exciting middle-grade thriller.

Chipper is a very special dog. He's part of a multi-million dollar experiment at a secret organization known only as The Institute. The Institute has been experimenting with dogs, melding them with state-of-the-art computer technology. But there's a problem with Chipper. His natural dog instincts often overrule his computer side. No matter what he's doing, if he sees a squirrel or a mouse, he'll drop everything to chase it. So The Institute has decided it's time to pull the plug on Chipper. Chipper manages a daring escape with a destination in mind, but a team from the Institute, led by the cold-hearted Daggert, is hot on his heels.
    
Twelve-year-old Jeff Conroy lives with his aunt and helps run her business, a lakeside cabin-rental operation that caters to fishermen. Jeff desperately misses his parents, who were killed in a plane crash a year earlier. But at least he's made one friend: Emily, whose ex-cop father owns a similar business down the lake. And Emily, a computer whiz, has the coolest fort ever: a trackless, abandoned train station in the middle of the forest.
    
After eluding his would-be captors, Chipper boards a bus and ends up in the country, only to be hit by a truck that Jeff is driving (underage). Jeff takes Chipper to the train station to nurse him back to health, and it's here that he and Emily discover a computer port in Chipper's collar, and once Emily hooks her laptop to it, she and Jeff discovers that Chipper's arrival is not random. He has been looking for Jeff -- and now so is Daggert ...

Escape

by Linwood Barclay

Published 5 April 2018
The Incredible Journey meets Gordon Korman's On the Run. The adventure continues in Linwood Barclay's follow-up novel to Chase!

Twelve-year-old Jeff and genetically engineered spy dog Chipper are on the run from the mysterious and sinister organization known only as The Institute, with help from Harry, the summer guest at Jeff's aunt's fishing cabins. Due to a combination of bravery, luck and some of Chipper's more useful modifications, they've managed to evade their pursuers so far. But The Institute is closing in and Chipper and Jeff will have to keep one step ahead if they want to stay alive. . . . Harry seems to have a plan to keep them hidden, but now even he seems to be acting suspiciously. Can Jeff and Chipper trust him?

Danger, secrets and thrilling suspense collide in Linwood Barclay's action-packed series for children.