Mission - Paperback

by Lance Novak (Author)

Mission is the story of Shayden Boselli, a troubled sixteen-year-old living in the sleepy, rural town of Pepperell, Massachusetts in 1987. Shayden is a heavy-metal-loving adolescent who wants to escape the stuffy, upper-middle-class neighborhood and conformist culture that surrounds him. As a way to "get back" at the community that they feel has swept them under the carpet, Shayden leads his friends Austin and Jared on "missions" in the middle of the night to wreak havoc on the neighborhood. One night, they make the fateful decision to burn down Thorton High School, but the mission ends in disaster as Shayden faces off against a power-hungry Jared. After getting caught and interrogated, Shayden and Austin are sent to a military prep school as punishment. Jared escapes and is never found. Thirty years later, Shayden-now a colonel in the United States Army-reflects back upon that fateful mission that forever changed his life. He returns home from a military conflict along the Korean border after being dubiously suspended from active duty, and he is contacted by none other than Jared, his old friend and nemesis from high school. Jared coerces him into joining a highly-specialized team of villains in a new "mission," one that will be both international in scope and detrimental to the world. Because the mission is tied to organized crime, and because he desperately wants to thwart Jared, Shayden realizes that his only hope of staying alive and foiling the mission is to join Jared and his accomplices and tear them apart from the inside. Facing certain death or life in jail, Shayden does whatever he can to stop Jared and his cronies from succeeding-while trying to put the disastrous events of that night back in 1987 behind him for good.