Book One: Mission One
In the next century, the world’s greatest secret agents all come from one place: Deveraux Academy, known affectionately to its student body as Spy High. Here, away from the prying eyes of a world ever more increasingly beset by evil geniuses and madmen, gifted students learn everything they need to know to keep society safe. For those who graduate, exciting careers and death-defying missions await. For those who fail, they have nothing to look forward to except a memory wipe and a return to a mundane life.
Enter the six members of Bond Team: intensely driven leader Ben Stanton Jr; farmboy Jake Daly; devil-may-care joker Eddie Nelligan; computer expert Cally Cross; Jennifer Chen, a beautiful martial artist haunted by her past; genius Lori Angel. These teenagers have to overcome their mutual distrust and personality clashes, if they ever want to succeed as a team and pass the numerous tests Spy High has to throw at them. But will their dissension prove irreparable? In their first book, Mission One, the members of Bond Team go up against the infamous Stromfeld training program, a deadly virtual reality distilled from history’s worst evil geniuses and madmen. They’ve had two strikes; one more, and they’re out of the Academy for good. But before they can tackle Stromfeld one last time, they’re ordered to take a small vacation, one which will have far-reaching consequences, and test them as individuals and as a team.
Book Two: Chaos Rising
In Chaos Rising, Bond Team may have come together for one victory, but they’re still not meshing properly. A power struggle is brewing, one of the members may have betrayed them, and out in the real world, a terrorist organization’s latest project has taken on a life of its own. What hope does the world have, when its saviors can’t even get along for ten minutes?
Spy High is a great concept with a solid beginning. A hidden school turning out teenage secret agents to defend a world in which evil geniuses turn up with alarming regularity, their mad schemes facilitated by the rapid evolution of technology? Awesome. It’s like the X-Men meet Spy Kids, with some Alias or Agent Cody Banks thrown in for good measure. Frankly, there’s not enough good young adult science fiction out there, and Spy High is a welcome addition to the genre. While the pacing and characterization suffers a little in places as the author finds his groove, the story as a whole is as entertaining as any Bond film, with some of the self-awareness that has come to characterize the new generation of spy flicks: they know they’re building on a tradition, and acknowledge what has come before. Overall, this looks to be a fun series, and I look forward to reading more about the intrepid Bond Team.
Book Three: The Serpent Scenario
The spies-in-training of Deveraux Academy’s Bond Team are back in their third thrilling adventure. The stakes are higher than ever, as one of their own leaves the school against orders, returning home to settle a years-old score. Jennifer Chen saw her family killed when she was younger, and at long last, she has a chance to get revenge against the man who did it, now the powerful leader of a vicious street gang called the Serpents. Meanwhile, her teammates are torn between regulations keeping them at Deveraux, and loyalty to their friend. Can they split their forces and still keep their tracks covered, or will tragedy tear them apart? Worse still, a deadly new drug called Drac has hit the streets, and the only clues to its origin and true nature lie behind a wall of diplomatic immunity, hidden in the depths of the Wallachian Cultural Exchange Building. What’s the connection between Talon, leader of the Serpents, and Vlad Tepesch, Prince of Wallachia?
As with the first two books in this series, The Serpent Scenario blends sharply-paced action sequences with high-tech toys, daredevil stunts and unpredictable plots. The Spy High series manages to be both an enjoyable homage to the spy story genre, and a fun extrapolation of what’s gone before, with training sequences for such time-honored scenes as “Villain Explains It All” and “In the Restaurant.” It’ll be interesting to see how the series progresses after the status quo-violating events of this book, especially as Butcher takes a fairly unexpected tack halfway through. Spy High is a fun series, and I’m looking forward to future installments.