Nick and Tesla’s Secret Agent Gadget Battle

Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith's Nick and Tesla's Secret Agent Gadget Battle is a science-packed spy mystery for 10 year olds about twins who suddenly suspect everyone.

What happens

This is the third Nick and Tesla mystery. The eleven-year-old twins are spending the summer with Uncle Newt, a brilliant inventor who is also forgetful and not very safe (his compost-powered engine keeps blowing up the basement).

Their parents said they were off to Uzbekistan to study soybeans. Then a voicemail arrives from their mum. Things are more complicated than they said. The people they were hiding the twins from know where they are. Don't trust... and then static. Later, the message has somehow been erased.

So Nick starts seeing spies everywhere. The grumpy neighbour. The friendly old man next door. The town's only police officer. Uncle Newt's new lady friend. Tesla thinks he's being paranoid (and she tells him so, loudly).

Then a stranger turns up in the kitchen holding a knife covered in peanut butter, saying he's Uncle Newt's apprentice from Australia. He doesn't sound Australian. A man walks in with what Nick is sure is a flamethrower (he's the exterminator). Two tiny maids arrive for a free first clean. And Uncle Newt can't even remember signing up for an apprentice.

It's a proper mystery, with Nick tricking a suspect into leaving fingerprints on a glass of lemonade. But it's very funny too. Uncle Newt is gloriously clueless, Oli the apprentice searches the kitchen for jelly and Nick and Tesla bicker like real twins.

You get to be inside both their heads. Nick worries about everything, and Tesla is the brave one (she's older by twelve minutes, as she'd point out). Is it scary? A little, in a spy-film way. Their parents might be in danger and nobody will tell the twins anything, and that worry sits quietly under the jokes.

If your reader loves science, the twins are always building something. It starts with a paper hoop glider that flies much further than planned and bops the kind neighbour on the nose.

What to read next

Keen for more of Uncle Newt's basement? Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage has the same neighbours, the same smelly bananas and a vacuum cleaner that blows up right at the start.