Publisher Description

In this second installment in the New York Times bestselling series from Edgar Award winner James Ponti, the young group of spies returns for another international adventure perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs. Smith's Spy School for Girls. After thwarting a notorious villain at an eco-summit in Paris, the City Spies are gearing up for their next mission. Operating out of a base in Scotland, this secret team of young agents working for the British Secret Intelligence Service's MI6 division have honed their unique skills, such as sleight of hand, breaking and entering, observation, and explosives. All of these allow them to go places in the world of espionage where adults can't. Fourteen-year-old Sydney is a surfer and a rebel from Bondi Beach, Australia. She's also a field ops specialist for the City Spies. Sydney is excited to learn that she'll be going undercover on the marine research vessel the Sylvia Earle. But things don't go exactly as planned, and while Sydney does find herself in the spotlight, it's not in the way she was hoping. Meanwhile, there's been some new intel regarding a potential mole within the organization, offering the spies a lead that takes them to San Francisco, California. But as they investigate a spy who died at the Botanical Gardens, they discover that they are also being investigated. And soon, they're caught up in an exciting adventure filled with rogue missions and double agents! This mission is hot! The City Spies are a go!

Author Biography

James Ponti is the New York Times bestselling author of four middle grade book series: The Sherlock Society following a group of young detectives; City Spies, about an unlikely squad of five kids from around the world who form an elite MI6 Spy Team; the Edgar Award-winning Framed! series, about a pair of tweens who solve mysteries in Washington, DC; and the Dead City trilogy, about a secret society that polices the undead living beneath Manhattan. His books have appeared on more than fifteen different state award lists, and he is the founder of a writers group known as the Renegades of Middle Grade. James is also an Emmy-nominated television writer and producer who has worked for many networks including Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, PBS, History, and Spike TV, as well as NBC Sports. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida. Find out more at JamesPonti.com.

Excerpt from Book

Chapter 1: The ''Sylvia Earle'', North Sea 1. The Sylvia Earle , North Sea IT WAS JUST AFTER DAWN, so the black-clad hijackers were barely visible as they moved with military precision across the deck of the marine research vessel Sylvia Earle . There were seven of them, and they wore special nonslip tactical shoes that gripped the damp metal surface, and balaclava ski masks that concealed their identities and shielded them from the cold ocean air. Virtually all of the ship''s passengers and crew were still asleep, so the intruders faced no resistance as they stormed the bridge and caught the duty officer by surprise. No alarm was sounded. No desperate call for help was transmitted over the radio. That meant the best hope to save the Sylvia Earle was one deck below, only half awake and yawning as she groggily looked for her best friend. There was no precision in her movements, and her pajamas were comfortable, not tactical: neon blue sweatpants, a Ravenclaw T-shirt, and wool socks decorated with cartoon narwhals. According to the ship''s manifest, her name was Christina Diaz, but that was just a cover identity created by the British Secret Intelligence Service. Among her fellow MI6 agents, she was Brooklyn. She was also twelve years old. Brooklyn had been awakened not by the arrival of the hijackers, but rather the endless snoring of two of her cabinmates. She turned on a small reading light above her bed to see if the same fate had befallen her friend Sydney, only to find Sydney''s bunk empty. At first, she assumed her fellow spy was down the hall using the restroom, or the "head" as they called it on the ship. But when Sydney didn''t return after a while and the snoring got louder, Brooklyn decided to look for her. She silently lowered herself from the upper bunk and slipped out the door into the passageway. She was on her way to the galley to see if Sydney was raiding the freezer for ice cream when a man''s voice came over the loudspeaker. That was the first sign of trouble. There weren''t supposed to be any men on the Sylvia Earle . The ship was carrying sixteen students, seven crew members, three scientists, and a documentary filmmaker on a weeklong trip meant to inspire girls to pursue careers in the sciences. Everyone on board was female... until now. Someone had crashed the party. "Attention! Attention!" He had a mild Scandinavian accent and spoke in a chilling monotone. "I am sorry to wake you, but we have taken control of the ship. Everybody must immediately come up to the main deck in a calm, orderly manner. If you obey our instructions, nobody will get hurt. But if you disobey, then you will be responsible for what happens next." Just like that, Brooklyn was wide awake and fully alert as she raced toward her cabin. MI6 had placed her and Sydney on the trip specifically to protect two girls: Judy Somersby, whose mother was a high-ranking member of Parliament, and Alice Hawthorne, who, despite being thirteen years old, was officially Lady Alice Hawthorne, daughter of the Duke of Covington. She was thirty-second in line for the throne, and for anyone who didn''t know that, she managed to work it into conversation with astonishing frequency. "Get up, now!" Brooklyn commanded as she flung open the door. The room was cramped--two sets of bunk beds with a narrow space barely shoulder-wide between them. Alice and Judy were on the bottom bunks, and when they failed to respond quickly enough, Brooklyn reached down, grabbed both sets of covers, and yanked them away like a magician. "I said, get up!" "I beg your pardon," Alice exclaimed. "You can''t speak to me that way. I''ll have you know--" "What?" Brooklyn interrupted. "That you''re thirty-second in line for the throne? If you don''t listen to me, there''s a decent chance everyone from thirty-three on down is going to move up a spot." Still sleepy, Judy sat up and mumbled, "What are you going on about?" "Pirates have seized the boat," Brooklyn said. "I think they''re coming for the two of you." "Pirates?" Judy gave her a confused look. "You mean with peg legs and parrots?" "Yes, and a crocodile with a loud clock in its stomach," Brooklyn replied sarcastically. "This isn''t a storybook. These are actual twenty-first-century criminals at sea. And you two are the most valuable treasure on this boat." There was a commotion in the passageway, and they could hear one of the hijackers yelling at everyone to get up to the main deck. "Is this some sort of prank?" asked Alice. "Because it''s not funny at all." "Apple jack!" blurted Brooklyn. "What?" Judy asked, still confused. "Apple jack," Brooklyn replied, although this time with less certainty. "That is the code, isn''t it? Didn''t your parents tell you about ''apple jack''?" MI6 had given this emergency code to the parents of both girls with the instructions that if someone used the term, they were supposed to follow that person''s directions without question. Neither Alice nor Judy had taken it very seriously, and if at all, they expected it to come from someone in authority wearing a uniform, not a twelve-year-old girl in Harry Potter jammies. But that''s because they had no way of knowing that perhaps the biggest secret in the British Secret Intelligence Service was an experimental team of five young agents aged twelve to fifteen who called themselves the City Spies. Their success relied heavily on the fact that their mere existence seemed unimaginable. Nobody ever saw them coming. And even if they did, who''d believe it? "Yes, but...," sputtered Alice. Just then a massive man filled the doorway. He was so big, his muscles had muscles. "Everybody to the main deck," he snarled, his yellowed teeth visible through the opening in his ski mask. "You don''t have time to put on the makeup." He was menacing. But while Alice and Judy were properly terrified, Brooklyn seemed more... annoyed . "What''s that supposed to mean?" she asked. He was only expecting shrieks and screams, so her question caught him off guard. "What do you say?" "That crack about makeup," she replied. "You think because we''re girls all we care about is our appearance? Is that it? That''s really sexist." "Get to the top of the boat, now!" he bellowed. To punctuate his point, he stepped through the doorway so that he loomed over the foot of each bed. Which was exactly where Brooklyn wanted him. She put her arms on the upper bunks to brace herself. Then, like a gymnast using parallel bars, she swung up the lower half of her body and executed a perfect scissor kick to the underside of his jaw. He froze momentarily before collapsing into a heap. Brooklyn turned to the girls. "So are you coming or what?" she asked. "Because there''s going to be more of him, and, at the moment, there''s only one of me." The two of them looked at the behemoth on the floor and then the slender girl who''d put him there. "We''re coming with you!" they said in unison as they scrambled to their feet. "Grab your shoes," Brooklyn said as she jammed on a pair of sneakers. "There''s climbing involved." "Climbing what?" Alice asked, alarmed, but Brooklyn was already out the door. The passageway was pure pandemonium. The alarm system blared and emergency lights flashed. Their shipmates headed toward the stairwell while Mr. Creepy kept talking over the loudspeaker. Brooklyn ignored it all and focused on going in the opposite direction with Alice and Judy right behind her. All the while, she kept an eye out for Sydney, who should''ve come straight to their cabin at the first sign of trouble. Brooklyn couldn''t imagine where she was and that had her worried. "Where are we going?" Alice demanded. "I''m not going to say it out loud because I don''t want anyone else to hear," Brooklyn said. "Just stay with me." She turned back and saw that the hijacker had regained consciousness and was now emerging from the cabin. He rubbed his tender jaw as he scanned the passageway, looking for them. When he spied Brooklyn, his eyes filled with rage. "You!" he roared as he lumbered toward them, swatting people out of his way like a movie monster. "I want you!" "Pick up the pace," Brooklyn urgently told the others. "We''ve got company." They hurried into a room marked WET LAB and closed the metal door behind them. The lab was filled with display tables, scientific equipment, and shallow saltwater tanks that held the marine specimens they''d studied during the week. Brooklyn checked for a lock on the door, but there wasn''t one. "What do we do?" asked Judy. "Hide," said Brooklyn. "Let me deal with him." "How?" asked Alice. "I don''t know yet," Brooklyn replied as she scanned a table, looking for anything that might fend him off. "We considered a lot of variables when we planned this op, but unfortunately didn''t come up with any specific contingencies for neutralizing a humongous hijacker with really bad teeth." "We?" said Alice, confused. "Op?" added Judy, equally befuddled. Brooklyn ignored them and turned off the overhead so that now the only light was coming from the aquariums built into the wall. This gave the room a hazy blue look, while the gentle movement of the water in the aquariums cast ghostly shadows across everything. Brooklyn kept looking until she hear

Details