Dealer No. 1 — James Ross

Breaking Bad meets Billy Elliott in this YA novel of drugs, dreams and dead-end families.Mickey Hall is a bright, friendly fifteen year-old from a chaotic family background - a feckless single-parent mother, a drug-addicted sister and a series of waster 'dads' - who realises that his life would become so much easier if he simply embraced a life of crime himself.Having decided on this course of action he assembles a group of like-minded schoolfriends, and adopts a huge fighting dog called Maximus and, being both charming and very ruthless he sets out to become the number one drug dealer in town.He also begins a relationship with the prettiest, coolest girl in school.Things are going well until one afternoon he is abducted by a car full of adult gangsters who take him to a disused warehouse where he thinks they are going to murder him but instead he is introduced to the leader of the gang - his own father, a powerful, influential and affluent figure in the criminal underworld. He is quickly seduced deep into a life of crime by his new-found father's wealth and power.Eventually though, Mickey finds himself in a situation where he must choose between saving his family and betraying his father, forced to choose between old loyalties and his new found wealth and security.Set in the grimy, poverty-stricken, north-eastern wasteland of Sunderland, a place of derelict industry, charity shops, and people riding 'benefit chariots' - a town that is ironically currently bidding for the title European City of Culture - comes this YA novel of broken dreams and dead-end families.