Steven “Steel” Trapp has been placed in an East Coast boarding school for gifted kids by his FBI agent father. He soon discovers that there’s a clubby element of faculty and upperclassmen that is very secretive and protective. To his surprise, his friend Kaileigh arrives at the school, and it isn’t long before the two realize that this is not your normal prep school. There are dark forces at play. Foreign agents may have penetrated the school’s secrecy and have sleepers in place: kids spying on future kid spies. Competition and intrigue among the elite faculty threaten security. As Steel and Kaileigh are recruited for their first run — trying to break a ring of pickpockets in a Boston hotel — things go impossibly wrong. Betrayal and conspiracy cloud what should have been a straightforward assignment. And all too soon, the two find that their very lives are in danger.
Ridley Pearson (www.ridleypearson.com), the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Wadham College, Oxford University, is the bestselling author of over 35 novels including, Peter And the Starcatchers (co-written with Dave Barry), the young adult novel, The Kingdom Keepers, and two dozen crime novels including: Probable Cause, Beyond Recognition and Killer Weekend (July 2007). His novel The Diary Of Ellen Rimbauer, a prequel to a Stephen King miniseries, was a New York Times #1 bestseller, as was Peter and the Shadow Thieves (#1 for 6 weeks). Ridley adapted The Diary Of Ellen Rimbaurer for ABC Television; it aired in 2003.
Peter and the Starcatchers is to open as a stage play, off-Broadway in March 2011, under Disney Theatrical.
Ridley is a founding member of, and plays bass guitar in, the all-author rock band, The Rockbottom Remainders (www.rockbottomremainders.com), with Dave Barry, Stephen King, Scott Turow, Mitch Albom, Amy Tan and Greg Iles. The band has raised over 2.5 million dollars for charities over its 18 year history.
