London Calling

James Ponti's London Calling is a spy thriller for 9 year olds that starts with a fifteen-year-old girl being chased across Istanbul.

What happens

Annie plays water polo and boards at a top school in the city. Everyone there knows her as Pam Ryan from California. That's a cover story. Her parents are spies, something went very wrong years ago, and she's been on the run ever since (Turkey is her ninth country!).

So when a big man in heavy black boots and a pressed shirt is hanging around outside the pool after practice, she notices. Then he follows her. Then he calls her by her real name.

Her escape is brilliant. She jumps on the back of a tram and races down hills and staircases with two men after her. Who doesn't love a heroine who keeps her head when everything's going wrong?

Meanwhile in Scotland, the City Spies have a very different job. They're keeping an eye on Sophie Weir, a maths teacher who's about to marry a prince. Kat, Sydney and Brooklyn go undercover as pupils in her class (Kat isn't great at blending in when there's a maths problem on the board).

Then Mother gets a phone call from someone he hasn't spoken to in six years. Annie has vanished, and suddenly it's the whole team's problem.

The two halves feel very different. Annie's chapters are tense and quite lonely, although her best friend Gökçe is still learning English and mixes her words up in the funniest ways ("annoyed" when she means paranoid).

Back at the team's base it's all teasing and Rio teaching Cairo to escape from handcuffs like Houdini (Cairo ends up on the floor, still tied to the chair).

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Annie's chase gets quite physical. She kicks one of the men off the tram and he hits his head, she tumbles down a flight of stairs and she ends up leaping off a high bridge into dark water.

A child who's nervous about strangers following them might find those opening chapters a bit much. If your reader likes a girl who fights back and thinks fast, they'll be cheering her on.

This one leans on a LOT of history between the characters. The missions change from book to book, but the team's own story runs right through, so a new reader should start with City Spies.

What to read next

If they're after another girl who spots everything, try Look Into My Eyes. Ruby Redfort writes down what she sees in little yellow notebooks (she's filled six hundred and twenty-two of them) and she's a genius with codes.