I HOPE YOU’RE LISTENING
2021 Lambda Award Winner Best LGBTQ Mystery
2021 Arthur Ellis Award Nominee Best Juvenile Crime Book
2021 ALA Quick Pick
2021 OLA Young Adult Best Bet
2022 ALA Rainbow List
2022 MYRCA Northern Lights Nominee
In a world littered with true crime podcasts, Radio Silent stands out. Not only is it wildly popular, with tens of thousands of devoted followers, it’s also proactive. The shadowy voice behind the show, disguised by filters and known only as The Seeker, prompts her listeners to help solve missing persons cases by sharing information and searching for clues online. In just one year, The Seeker and her army of devoted ‘laptop detectives’ have managed to crowdsource solutions to several mysteries that police weren’t able to solve on their own.
Seventeen year old Delia “Dee” Skinner is haunted by a missing persons case of her own. When she was 8 years old, she and her best friend Sibby Carmichael were accosted by three strangers in the woods behind their street. Dee was tied to a tree and forced to watch, helpless, as Sibby was taken away, never to be seen again.
Everyone in town knows Dee’s story, and nobody blames her - other than herself, that is. But what nobody realizes is that Dee is “The Seeker,” and Radio Silent is her brainchild. Dee keeps her secret locked down tight; aside from her best friend Burke, nobody knows that she’s behind Radio Silent. She also sticks to some serious ground rules: she only profiles missing people, she only features cases that have the potential for a happy outcome, and she never, ever, gets personal.
When Layla, a little girl now living in Dee’s old house, goes missing, and a note is left behind alluding to Sibby’s disappearance, the old case is unearthed and Dee’s carefully established balancing act begins to shift out of her control. Worst of all, sensation-chasing celebrity ‘journalist’ Quinlee Ellacott, who’s been trying to uncover the identity of The Seeker, shows up in town, poking around and getting too close to Dee, and her complicated history, for comfort.
Despite Burke’s urgings, Dee resists using the podcast to help figure out what happened to Layla. But when an email appears in her inbox drawing a direct connection between Layla’s disappearance and Sibby’s, and suggesting that Sibby is still alive, Dee decides that there’s no hiding from the past, and decides to tackle both investigations on her own.
With some help from Burke, the cute new girl from across the street, and her army of laptop detectives, Dee attempts to solve the two mysteries at once. There are just two questions - is she ready for what she uncovers about the disappearances, and more importantly, is she ready for what uncovers about herself?