Evil Spy School

What I Loved: Anytime the Principal is involved, it is sure to be quite the laugh. Ben gets himself expelled from Spy School when he saves everyone from a live round going off by sending it into the school where no one was supposed to be. However, the Principal, being a bumbling fool, was once again not doing his job and was inside the building. He only survived because he was in the bathroom during the explosion. His personal blow-up at Ben was hilarious.
Ben ends up back at normal school and his friend Mike definitely notices that Ben has moves now that a mere nerdy science school shouldn’t have taught him. He jokingly tells everyone that Ben was training to be a spy. This is cool and the girls take notice, but Ben can’t admit that it is the truth. It is quite a dilemma when your image is everything in middle school. This really shows what an upstanding character Ben is as he tries to navigate the social scene and keep the secrets he swore.
SPYDER, the Evil Spy school, comes to recruit him again. Since regular school is terrible and Ben suspects Erica may have created this situation to get him into to evil spy school he decides to attend. He definitely took a leap of faith in joining. He either has Erica and her grandfather, Cyrus Hale, looking out for him or he really did just become an evil member. The reader is right there with him believing it probably is a mission Erica orchestrated but not being sure.
His fellow evil spy students are Ashley Sparks and Nefarious Jones. Ashley is perky but is ok doing evil things after being jilted from her spot on the Olympic team. I enjoyed her character’s quirk of combining two words like sweet and awesome to get “swawesome”. Nefarious is a couch potato one step above comatose as he only plays video games and eats Cheetos.
Ben has to work with Murray Hill again, once he is broken out of custody and we learn that Joshua Hallal is alive if badly damaged from his last encounter with them. Ben works as a double agent trying to learn SPYDER’S secrets and their trust while hoping this is all part of Erica’s plan. His skills continue to grow during this mission as he does most of the work of thwarting SPYDER on his own.
Final verdict: With a name like Evil Spy School, I wasn’t sure how Ben was going to believably end up at SPYDER. Stuart Gibbs is masterful at his craft and he takes this premise and makes it work. This book has twists and turns and lots of situational humor. I used an audiobook to read this story and the narrator does a great job of having dry wit in his tone without being over the top. This was another book in the series that was fast action and hard to put down till we got to the end.