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Hero

Author Mike Lupica
Ebook
Penguin Young Readers | Viking Books for Young Readers
On sale Nov 02, 2010 | 304 Pages | 9781101198377
Grade 5 & Up
Reading Level: Lexile 730L
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From the #1 New York Times bestseller Mike Lupica comes the story of one unsuspecting boy poised to follow in his superhero father’s footsteps

Fourteen-year-old Billy Harriman can feel the changes. The sharpening of his senses. The incredible strength. The speed, as though he can textmessage himself across miles. The confidence and the strange need to patrol Central Park at night. His dad had been a hero, a savior to America and a confidante of the president. Then he died, and the changes began in Billy. What Billy never knew was that his father was no ordinary man-he was a superhero, battling the world's evil. This is a battle that has been waged for generations and that knows no boundaries.

And now it's Billy's turn to take on the fight. It's Billy's turn to become a hero.

“[N]othing Mike Lupica has written will thrill you like this.” –William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride
 
“Sportswriter and novelist Lupica offers a change of pace from his previous sports stories for younger readers, deftly reworking the traditional superhero origin story into a moving tale of adolescent growth.” –Publisher’s Weekly
 
“[T]he stage is set for a sequel to what looks like a surefire hit.” –School Library Journal

 

Mike Lupica is a prominent sports journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction. A longtime friend to Robert B. Parker, he was selected by the Parker estate to continue the Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone series. View titles by Mike Lupica
1
 
THERE were four thugs, total gangsters, in front of the house with their rifles and their night-vision goggles. Four more in back. No telling how many more inside.
 
So figure a dozen hard guys at least, protecting one of the worst guys in the world.
 
Not one of them having a clue about how much trouble they were really in, how badly I had them outnumbered.
 
Hired guns, in any country, never worried me. The Bads? They were the real enemy, worse than any terrorists, even if I was one of the few people alive who knew they existed.
 
Even my boss, the president of the United States, didn’t know what we were really up against, how much he really needed me.
 
When he talked about our country fighting an “unseen” threat, he didn’t know how true that really was.
 
When my son, Zach, was little, I used to tell him these fantastic bedtime stories about the Bads, and he thought I was making them up. I wasn’t.
 
The snow was falling hard now, bringing night along with it. Not good. Definitely not good. I didn’t need a blizzard tonight, not if I wanted to get the plane in the air once I got back to the small terminal near the airport in Zagreb. Which was only going to happen if I could get past the guards, get inside, and then back out with the guy I’d come all this way for. It meant things going the way they were supposed to, which didn’t always happen in my line of work.
 
My official line of work? That would be special adviser to the president. A title that meant nothing on nights like this. On assignments like this. The real job description was fixing things, things that other people couldn’t, saving people who needed saving, capturing
people who needed to be stopped. Dispensing my own brand of justice.
 
Sometimes I had help, people watching my back.
 
Not tonight. Tonight I was on my own. Not even the president knew I was here. Sometimes you have to play by your own rules.
 
On this remote hill in northern Bosnia, near where the concentration camps had been discovered a few years before, I had managed to finally locate a Serb war criminal and part-time terrorist named Vladimir Radovic. He was known to governments around the world
and decent people everywhere as Vlad the Bad because of all the innocent people he’d slaughtered when he was in power, before he was on the run.
 
To me, he was known by a code name, which I thought fit him much better:
 
The Rat.
 
I was here to catch the Rat.
 
Me, Tom Harriman. About to blow past the guns and inside a cabin that had been turned into an armed fortress.
 
Almost time now. I didn’t just feel the darkness all around me, as if night had fallen out of the sky all at once. I could feel another darkness coming up inside me, the way it always did in moments like this, when something was about to happen. When I didn’t have to keep my own bad self under control. When I could be one of the good guys but not have to behave like one.
 
The me that still scares me.
 
Time to go in and tell the Rat his ride was here.
Copyright © 2010 by Mike Lupica. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Praise for Hero:
 
“[N]othing Mike Lupica has written will thrill you like this.” –William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride
 
“Sportswriter and novelist Lupica offers a change of pace from his previous sports stories for younger readers, deftly reworking the traditional superhero origin story into a moving tale of adolescent growth.” –Publisher’s Weekly
 
“[T]he stage is set for a sequel to what looks like a surefire hit.” –School Library Journal

About

From the #1 New York Times bestseller Mike Lupica comes the story of one unsuspecting boy poised to follow in his superhero father’s footsteps

Fourteen-year-old Billy Harriman can feel the changes. The sharpening of his senses. The incredible strength. The speed, as though he can textmessage himself across miles. The confidence and the strange need to patrol Central Park at night. His dad had been a hero, a savior to America and a confidante of the president. Then he died, and the changes began in Billy. What Billy never knew was that his father was no ordinary man-he was a superhero, battling the world's evil. This is a battle that has been waged for generations and that knows no boundaries.

And now it's Billy's turn to take on the fight. It's Billy's turn to become a hero.

“[N]othing Mike Lupica has written will thrill you like this.” –William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride
 
“Sportswriter and novelist Lupica offers a change of pace from his previous sports stories for younger readers, deftly reworking the traditional superhero origin story into a moving tale of adolescent growth.” –Publisher’s Weekly
 
“[T]he stage is set for a sequel to what looks like a surefire hit.” –School Library Journal

 

Author

Mike Lupica is a prominent sports journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction. A longtime friend to Robert B. Parker, he was selected by the Parker estate to continue the Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone series. View titles by Mike Lupica

Excerpt

1
 
THERE were four thugs, total gangsters, in front of the house with their rifles and their night-vision goggles. Four more in back. No telling how many more inside.
 
So figure a dozen hard guys at least, protecting one of the worst guys in the world.
 
Not one of them having a clue about how much trouble they were really in, how badly I had them outnumbered.
 
Hired guns, in any country, never worried me. The Bads? They were the real enemy, worse than any terrorists, even if I was one of the few people alive who knew they existed.
 
Even my boss, the president of the United States, didn’t know what we were really up against, how much he really needed me.
 
When he talked about our country fighting an “unseen” threat, he didn’t know how true that really was.
 
When my son, Zach, was little, I used to tell him these fantastic bedtime stories about the Bads, and he thought I was making them up. I wasn’t.
 
The snow was falling hard now, bringing night along with it. Not good. Definitely not good. I didn’t need a blizzard tonight, not if I wanted to get the plane in the air once I got back to the small terminal near the airport in Zagreb. Which was only going to happen if I could get past the guards, get inside, and then back out with the guy I’d come all this way for. It meant things going the way they were supposed to, which didn’t always happen in my line of work.
 
My official line of work? That would be special adviser to the president. A title that meant nothing on nights like this. On assignments like this. The real job description was fixing things, things that other people couldn’t, saving people who needed saving, capturing
people who needed to be stopped. Dispensing my own brand of justice.
 
Sometimes I had help, people watching my back.
 
Not tonight. Tonight I was on my own. Not even the president knew I was here. Sometimes you have to play by your own rules.
 
On this remote hill in northern Bosnia, near where the concentration camps had been discovered a few years before, I had managed to finally locate a Serb war criminal and part-time terrorist named Vladimir Radovic. He was known to governments around the world
and decent people everywhere as Vlad the Bad because of all the innocent people he’d slaughtered when he was in power, before he was on the run.
 
To me, he was known by a code name, which I thought fit him much better:
 
The Rat.
 
I was here to catch the Rat.
 
Me, Tom Harriman. About to blow past the guns and inside a cabin that had been turned into an armed fortress.
 
Almost time now. I didn’t just feel the darkness all around me, as if night had fallen out of the sky all at once. I could feel another darkness coming up inside me, the way it always did in moments like this, when something was about to happen. When I didn’t have to keep my own bad self under control. When I could be one of the good guys but not have to behave like one.
 
The me that still scares me.
 
Time to go in and tell the Rat his ride was here.
Copyright © 2010 by Mike Lupica. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Praise

Praise for Hero:
 
“[N]othing Mike Lupica has written will thrill you like this.” –William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride
 
“Sportswriter and novelist Lupica offers a change of pace from his previous sports stories for younger readers, deftly reworking the traditional superhero origin story into a moving tale of adolescent growth.” –Publisher’s Weekly
 
“[T]he stage is set for a sequel to what looks like a surefire hit.” –School Library Journal

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