"City Spies: Golden Gate" by James Ponti

Behold, book 2 in this series (of which I have read books 3 and 4). Having already defeated... actually, I haven't read book 1 so I don't really know but the answer is probably "criminals," the City Spies must now face their most dangerous foe yet: teenage drama.

Yeah, this book makes me glad that Sydney and Brooklyn have gotten their friendship ironed out in the next books, because they spend a lot of their time angrily avoiding each other. And then making themselves get along when it's mission time, only to go right back to drama when the mission is over.

I really liked that this book had a short backstory scene about MI6 recruiting Kat, stuck right into the middle of the book (around page 256). She's my favorite character, which meant that I'm happier than I would have been had the backstory scene been about, say, Brooklyn or Rio.

Anyway, there's also a lot of actual plot stuff revolving around a (mostly) retired agent who got assigned to find a mole in MI6, but instead he wound up dead. So the actual point of the book is about finding a bunch of stuff he left behind in order to find out who the mole was, while the mole tries to find all the stuff as well in order to preserve their identity.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ probably, for some scary scenes with a bunch of pirates hijacking a ship and also some fight scenes and explosions. It'd make a pretty decent stealth action videogame.

Like the others, this one gets 4 stars.

 

Favorite lines:

 

    "You know the Prince of Wales and you call him Jimmy?" asked Sydney.

    Page 408.

(Endnote: Throwing a sea urchin at them is officially my favorite way anyone in this series has ever incapacitated a bad guy.)