View this third installment in the New York Times bestselling series from Edgar Award winner James Ponti, the young group of spies help a fellow agent in another international adventure perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs.

Please note: This review is based on the final hardcover book provided by the publisher, Aladdin, for review purposes. Be sure to recommend the sequel, “ City Spies: Golden Gate” which is just as enjoyable. Prepare for an enjoyable read that, ironically, features a deadly virus that has no cure. The plot is intriguing, the dialogue snappy, the characters very appealing and appealingly flawed, and the book difficult to put down. Kids will eagerly anticipate its appearance. So the scene is set for the next book in this new series. And while the team does thwart the dastardly plot by the end of the story, they do not (spoiler alert) nab the bad guy. The story jumps from Brooklyn to Scotland and then to Paris, where the team participates in a science challenge as part of their mission for MI6. Ponti gives a bit of backstory for some of the team members and in the process shares the backstory of Mother, who lost his wife and children when his wife, also a spy for MI6, double-crossed him, left him for dead, and absconded with their two children. She boasts of hacking into an astronaut’s computer to wish her a happy birthday and then shares that she had to hack into international computers because the astronaut in question was on the International Space System for her birthday. She passes with flying colors.Įach team member has his or her speciality, and Sara’s is her wicked computer skills. But before she becomes a bona fide member of the team, she must prove herself. Since all members of the team are named after the cities they came from, Sara becomes Brooklyn and joins Paris, Rio, Sydney, and Kat. By that evening, she’s on a plane to Scotland and a new life. After she quickly hacks into the State of New York court computers to substitute in the new lawyer, the change of attorneys looks legitimate.

But when a debonair man offers to represent her, she quickly chooses him as her lawyer rather than the public defender who was going to agree to her serving time in a juvenile detention home. She is in custody after hacking into the New York City computers to expose her cheating, horrible foster parents. A group of underdog kids as young as twelve live in an old manor home in Scotland and work with a British spy nicknamed “Mother” as a team foiling international villains.įirst we meet Sara, from whose perspective the story is mostly told. “City Spies” by James Ponti is an action story that kids (and adults) will love.

City spies