Mission Manhattan

James Ponti's Mission Manhattan is a funny, fast spy adventure for 9 year olds that kicks off with two secret agents dressed as giant bumblebees.

What happens

It's the fifth book about the City Spies. They're a team of six kids, aged eleven to sixteen, who go on MI6 missions where a grown-up would stick out a mile.

This time they're in Venice. A huge climate protest is about to fill St Mark's Square, and British intelligence has picked up a very odd warning about an attack there by "the walking dead".

Is it a code? A message that got mangled in translation? The start of a zombie apocalypse? Nobody has a clue (which is exactly the problem).

So Paris and Cairo squeeze into padded bee costumes to march with the protesters. Kat runs the mission from the top of the bell tower. Rio has the job of staying close to Beatriz, the sixteen-year-old activist the whole crowd has come to hear.

Then the suspects start piling up. There are zombies, bees carrying cardboard tombstones and two people in creepy plague doctor masks pushing a giant globe. When a third plague doctor appears out of nowhere, it gets serious very quickly.

It's SUCH good fun to read. The team never stop joking in each other's earpieces, even mid-mission. Cairo moans that his costume is giving him a wedgie and Mother (one of the two grown-ups in charge) can only reply by asking a police officer where the toilet is.

Rio is a massive fan of Beatriz and has to try very hard not to be starstruck. And each of the first four chapters ends on a proper cliffhanger, so "just one more chapter" is going to come up a lot.

It's worth knowing that there's a real bomb in this one. It goes off on a boat in the lagoon a few chapters in, and everyone on board has to jump into the freezing water (they all get off in time). People get knocked over in the panic too.

For a child who gets worried by news stories about attacks, that might feel a bit close to home. If your reader loves real danger with lots of laughs in between, they'll be gripped. And Venice is only where it starts (the title's a pretty big clue about where the team are heading).

What to read next

If your reader hasn't met the team yet, it's worth going back to the very first City Spies book. That's where Sara, a twelve-year-old hacker from Brooklyn, is waiting in a New York court when a man who calls himself Mother walks in.