"City Spies: Forbidden City" by James Ponti

After reading book 4 a while back, I've gotten book 3 of this series out of the library as well. This one has less hacking and explosions and more sneaking around and playing chess. Actual chess, as well as metaphorical chess.

Basically, there's this guy from North Korea who's made it as plain as he can that he doesn't want to be in North Korea while maintaining plausible deniability. Both the good guys and the bad guys want to recruit him. Also there's a bunch of stolen nuclear warheads, and chess. (I don't know tons about chess. Like, I can usually hold my own against other relative beginners, but I don't know the names of any openings or tactics or anything, or even how to do them.)

There's one plot point that revolves around a social media account that occasionally posts the same picture of St. Basil's Cathedral. However, something's off: the colors on the domes are slightly different each time. My guess as to a possible way of decoding it was, "Why don't you check how the computer encodes the colors and see if that gives you any clues?" |Guess how they cracked it.|

There's another character who's peripherally in this, and who's apparently a former member of the spy team: Charlotte. Her name is both a person name and a city name, so it didn't trip me up. Kat (Kathmandu) still does, though; I keep wanting to call her Katherine. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for kidnapping and some chase scenes. Like the next one, it would be a fairly fun stealth game. Unless they made a few alterations or had the chess take place in cutscenes, though, it would get a bit tedious doing all that, especially since most of the people chessing at each other are supposed to be really good at it and most of the people who would play the game aren't.

This one is as good as the next one, which is to say, I give it 4 stars.

(Endnote: I think I'll get book 2 out of the library next, and then book 1, and then I'll have read the entire series in reverse order.)