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James Ponti's Golden Gate is a gripping spy adventure for 9 year olds that kicks off with a research ship hijacked in the North Sea.
It's the second City Spies book and it doesn't hang about. Brooklyn is twelve and still fairly new to MI6's squad of kid spies. Right now she's undercover on a week-long science trip for girls, pretending to be just another student.
Her real job is to protect two of her cabinmates. Judy's mum is an MP. Alice is a duke's daughter and thirty-second in line to the throne (she mentions it A LOT).
Then, just after dawn, masked men take over the bridge and start searching for those two girls. And Sydney, the spy who's supposed to be in charge, is nowhere to be found.
Where is she? Twelve metres underwater, on a night dive she definitely wasn't allowed to take. When she surfaces she spots an empty army box that once held plastic explosives. Somebody has put a bomb on the ship.
The story keeps switching between the two girls, so you're always desperate to know what the other one is doing. Brooklyn fights back with a rubber glove and a sea urchin from the science lab (we won't say any more than that!). Sydney watches her air run low while she hunts along the hull.
It's very funny too. In the middle of a standoff Brooklyn corrects a hijacker's English and calls him out on his sexist comments. The gang's leader admits he has three teenage daughters, which gives her the perfect excuse for a cheeky joke about his dinner-table chat.
When things get scary the girls remember Mother's silly rhyming tips. He's the grown-up spy in charge of them, and those rhymes are a lovely way of seeing how they keep their heads.
The danger here feels real. Hijackers seize the ship, the passengers are threatened and the plan is to kidnap two girls for ransom while a bomb ticks away. A child who gets anxious about kidnappings or explosions might find the opening a lot.
If your reader loves a countdown and a heroine who stays cool under pressure, though, they'll be gripped.
New to the team? Go back to the very first City Spies book, where Brooklyn's story begins in a New York courtroom with a very unusual lawyer.
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