Shana Silver Books in Order

Shana Silver writes young adult novels built around clever premises, big questions, and teenagers who have to act fast when the adults around them cannot fix the problem. Her two published novels pair suspense with romance, putting their main characters in situations where trust matters as much as technical skill or a good disguise.

She studied creative writing at Syracuse University, then worked in several visual and digital fields before publishing fiction. Her résumé includes computer animation, e-book creation for a major publisher, and project management in digital and television advertising. It is a practical mix of jobs for a writer drawn to systems, screens, and the ways people use information.

That work history also helps explain the nuts-and-bolts feel of her stories. Silver's characters are not simply handed futuristic tools or elaborate plans. They have to understand the rules, bend them, and deal with what happens when a shortcut starts hurting someone.

The seed for Mind Games came from science-fiction conversations with her father. She has said that talks about ideas like time travel, aliens, and the growing power of cloud storage led her to wonder what it might mean if personal memories could be stored, shared, and stolen. The question became an action story, but it also gave her a very human problem to explore: what remains when the past you rely on is missing?

Published in 2019, Mind Games follows Arden, a teen programmer at a school for gifted students. Her father helped develop HiveMind, a memory-sharing system, and Arden has learned how to use it for an off-the-books school business. When someone deletes part of her memory, including her connection to Sebastian, the boy she is supposed to know, the two have to figure out who is tampering with their minds. It's part tech thriller, part mystery, and part slow-burn relationship story.

In Silver's world, memory is both a tool and a liability.

Her second novel, The Con Code, arrived in 2020 and moves from near-future memory hacking to a contemporary art-heist setup. Fiona Spangler makes money running minor cons at her prep school, while her bigger job is helping her father recover forged artworks that her missing mother planted with clues. When the FBI takes her father into custody, Fiona brings together a small crew to finish the remaining thefts. The group includes a hacker, a quick-change artist, and a rival con artist, so the book makes room for banter, shifting loyalties, and plans that have to change on the fly.

Silver has described both books as separate stories, although she imagines their characters sharing a broader universe. That makes either novel an easy place to begin. Readers looking for science fiction and questions about identity may start with Mind Games, while readers who prefer a scavenger hunt, a tight crew, and art-world puzzles may lean toward The Con Code.

Her writing process sounds as hands-on as her plots. Silver has talked about major revisions to Mind Games, including reworking much of the draft, combining characters, and reshaping the story so Arden had more control over the action. She also revised The Con Code's final act to let its characters spend more time dealing with a key turn in the plot.

The common thread is momentum. Silver writes about capable teens facing problems that are bigger than a school assignment or a family argument, then asks them to choose whom they can trust when the rules suddenly change.