City Spies (City Spies, #1) by James Ponti
on March 10, 2020
ISBN: 1534414916
Genres: Adventure
Format: Chapter Book Fiction
Goodreads

An entertaining start to this new middle grade series. Sara Martinez has been in the foster care system and used her hacking skills to call out her latest bad foster parents, but she gets in trouble. While in court, a man swoops in and defends Sara and asks that she be remanded to his care. He happens to lead a group of extraordinary kids who work as a spy unit for MI6 out of a Scottish base. There are usual blips as Sara attempts to find her spot on the team. There is also a master criminal, a extreme science fair-type competition, and plenty of thrills. The book has a good pace and plenty of action, but one hacker supposedly hacks another hacker and causes that team to mess up; wouldn’t the one hacker have been able to catch the code embedded by the other hacker? And at one point, the team infiltrates a highly secure building that seems to have no security cameras inside and some pretty lax security guards. All of that is in the name of plot movement but it did take me out of the story in a way that made it hard to give this a higher rating. Readers of Stuart Gibbs books and Ponti’s Framed series, which I loved, will enjoy this first book in which should be an entertaining and engaging series.

Reviewed by Jill O’Connor, Merrill Memorial Library, Yarmouth