By Stuart Gibbs
Ben's only real talent is math, so a secret CIA spy academy seems like a strange fit, until he learns the school recruited him as bait to draw out a killer hiding inside it.
Twelve-year-old Ben Ripley is great at math and pretty much nothing else, so he can hardly believe it when a CIA agent walks into his living room and offers him a spot at the Academy of Espionage, a spy school tucked into a leafy corner of Washington, DC. Ben pictures gadgets and glory. What he gets is grueling survival classes, a roommate who seems to hate him, and, on his very first night, an armed stranger climbing through his dorm window. The truth comes out fast: the school brought Ben in as bait. There's a mole somewhere among the staff and students, and Ben is the worm on the hook. Now he has to work out who wants him dead, with help from Erica, the toughest and most impossible-to-read student in the place.
This is built for the child who swears they don't like reading. Gibbs runs two motors at once, the mystery of who the mole is and the comedy of Ben being wildly out of his depth, and he tends to cut chapters off mid-danger so your child keeps going for just one more. Ben wins by thinking, running the odds and catching patterns nobody else sees, which lets a clever, not-especially-athletic child picture themselves as the hero. The jokes come fast, the plot keeps yanking the rug, and there are more than a dozen books waiting, so a hooked reader is set for a good long while.