One minute, 17-year-old Max Stein is sitting in his high school auditorium, watching a live presidential debate. The next, he’s watching – along with everyone else in the room – as his friend Evan hacks into the debate’s live video feed and shoots himself after uttering a very cryptic question: “What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?”

That this is how the new novel from E.C. Myers – the Andre Norton Award-winning author of Fair Coin, which I loved – opens is compelling enough. That it happens within the first 15 pages of the novel is something I found outright gripping. Myers rockets the story from establishing scenario to brutal catalyst almost immediately, trusting his readers to take his hand and follow him on what will be a bullet-train of a techno thriller. Handled clumsily, this kind of set up might make the reader skittish. In Myers’ hands, though, it sends a message: All will be revealed if you just hang on for the ride.

Because Evan made contact with him shortly before his death, Max is suddenly at the center of a government manhunt, and a conspiracy that he can’t possibly begin to comprehend. Reeling from his friend’s drastic act, and desperate for answers, he must dive back into his own previously abandoned hacker identity, and navigate a complex online world of aliases, back doors, secrets and lies, before it’s too late to find out what Evan really gave his life for.

I remember all-too-well the emotionally harrowing feeling that everything when you’re a teenager, even the most mundane thing, is a high-stakes moment, so I’m a sucker for stories that take that all-or-nothing rollercoaster of adolescence and morph it into an adventure where the stakes actually are high. In the world of The Silence of Six, the secrets teenagers harbor really are worth dying and killing for. The government really is out to get you. Every keystroke really can be watched over by someone else. This is a world of whispers and codes and masks, both physical and virtual, a world where you sometimes have to lie and steal to survive another day, a world where the truth could mean permanent silence. It’s got all the trappings of a government conspiracy blockbuster, but instead of a renegade cop or a paranoid reporter, a handful of resourceful teenage hackers are in the driver’s seat, and that makes it all the more engaging.

One of the things I found most impressive about Fair Coin was Myers’ ability to simultaneously deliver the goods we’ve come to expect from a story of that kind, and subvert those expectations. He does it again with The Silence of Six. It’s a techno-conspiracy-cyber-thriller, with everything that implies. It’s a search for the truth, a story about making it to the center of this knot of secrets no matter what, and to that end it’s a breathlessly entertaining page-turner that darts artfully forward from page one and never lets up. But that doesn’t mean Myers won’t to stop play with some of the conventions he’s working in. His hero is not an action star or an always technically precise supergenius. He’s a gifted, scared kid determined to find whatever right he can in a world that’s just gone wrong for him in countless ways. What looks like it could be a romantic subplot evolves into something else entirely, as Max forms a connection with another hacker that’s built more on personal stakes and, perhaps, a mutual sense of mischief than something romantic. The hacking done by the characters isn’t a few quick keystrokes of brilliance, but rather a series of clever, yet often imperfect, ploys to get to the next clue. The hacking in this story is both messy and satisfyingly geeky, giving it a realism that nerdier readers will happily get lost in. Perhaps most importantly for a thriller, though, the solution to this puzzle is both satisfying and surprising. Even if you actually do think you see the end of this book from a mile away, how Myers and his characters arrive at it, and what happens when they do, still manages to defy a few of the rules set forth by so many stories of this kind.

With The Silence of Six, Myers has again proven his gifts as a storyteller who both celebrates the tropes of genre fiction and wants to pick them apart and stitch them back together into a new creature. It’s a lightning-fast thriller with other, darker themes lurking beneath, and even if you think you’ve read books like this before, it will find a way to surprise you.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Silence of Six is available today.