Nicki Demere is an orphan and a pickpocket. She also happens to be the U.S. Marshals’ best bet to keep a family alive. . . .
The marshals are looking for the perfect girl to join a mother, father, and son on the run from the nation's most notorious criminals. After all, the bad guys are searching for a family with one kid, not two, and adding a streetwise girl who knows a little something about hiding things may be just what the marshals need.
Nicki swears she can keep the Trevor family save, but to do so she'll have to dodge hitmen, cyberbullies, and the specter of standardized testing, all while maintaining her marshal-mandated B-minus average. As she barely balances the responsibilities of her new identity, Nicki learns that the biggest threats to her family's security might not lurk on the road from New York to North Carolina, but rather in her own past.
"Jake Burt is a storytelling magician. Part coming of age tale and part spy thriller, Greetings from Witness Protection could be a collaboration between Judy Blume and Ian Fleming."
—Ann M. Martin, New York Times–bestselling author of Rain Reign and the Baby-Sitters Club series.
"This inventive, clever story has a lot of heart at its center. Jake Burt's debut is utterly rewarding."
—Wendy Mass, New York Times–bestselling author of The Candymakers and Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
The biggest complaint that readers may have about Burt's debut novel is that it ends. Sassy, snarky Nicki Demere—a 13-year-old foster kid with a big heart and the quick hands of a seasoned thief—is commissioned by the U.S. marshals to join a family in the Witness Protection Program that is hiding from one of the deadliest crime organization in the country. As daughter Charlotte, she'll help them fly under the radar in North Carolina. Nicki/Charlotte is caustically charming... and despite her propensity to pick people's pockets when she's nervous, her eagerness to love (and be loved) and her unabashed bluntness make her endearing from page one."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Jake Burt teaches fifth grade in Connecticut. He lives with his wife and their daughter in Hamden, CT. Greetings from Witness Protection is his fiction debut.
