BooksCanadian

Chase

A children's book by Linwood Barclay.

Linwood Barclay

CBC Books Posted: Jul 23, 2018 2:50 PM EDT | Last Updated: July 26, 2018

Award-winning Canadian books from the first half of 2018

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 theInstitute, 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... (Published by Puffin Canada)

From the book

The moment the White Coat entered the room filled with cages, the prisoner just knew what he was planning. The White Coat was going to kill him.

It might have been the way White Coat man smiled at him through the bars of his cage. The man almost never smiled. He looked at the prisoner through his oversized, black-rimmed glasses. This White Coat was in his fifties, with thinning grey hair. He was a spindly, pale man who spent most of his days sitting at a computer or supervising in the lab, where many of the experiments were conducted and the installations performed. A security card that allowed him to move freely through the building hung around his neck on an elastic strap.

FromChaseby Linwood Barclay 2017. Published by Puffin Canada.