Double Cross

This is the very welcome fourth novel in Blackman's award-winning Noughts and Crosses series, which continues the story of Callie Rose, from the ruling elite black class and Tobey, from the minority 'blankers'.

Each teenager harbours a dreadful secret, their reluctant friendship flowering and faltering through shared experience, unwilling criminal involvement and the use of violence to defeat evil.

Blackman portrays an engagingly vulnerable, multifaceted character in Tobey, who narrates the majority of the book, and through him creates for her readers profound moral and ethical dilemmas.

Her dystopian world is sufficiently close to ours for teenage readers to draw many disturbing parallels with contemporary urban culture, but happily resolution is offered through the ultimate indestructibility of true loyalty and love.