Playing with Fire by Bruce Hale (review)

None of Max Segredo's foster-home placements have worked out (hey, he wasn't the one who started those fires), and now he has reached the Merry Sunshine Orphanage, the penultimate stop before juvie hall. Immediately, there are pretty clear tip-offs that this isn't your average orphan school: a classmate attacks Max in his bed, and a faculty member slings a knife at him when he opens a random door. Merry Sunshine is, in fact, a training academy for juvenile spies, and the group is currently strategizing to stop a shipment of Nullthium-Ninety, a potent substance scheduled to be stolen and transported by LOTUS, an organization of really, really bad people. Unfortunately, Max is distracted by coded notes from an anonymous source suggesting that his father is still alive, and running his own side mission is more important to him than cooperating with a bunch of oddballs he barely knows. Max isn't the lead character for nothing, however, and after stowing away in barrels, evading infrared motion sensors, surviving a shark tank, and booby-trapping a villain's kitchen with an overcooked midnight snack, Max the near traitor turns into Max the hero, who realizes his fellow orphans are now his excellent new family. This is a short step up in complexity from Hale's Chet Gecko mysteries (The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse, BCCB 6/00), and fans of that series will appreciate that the author's signature similes ("His scrawls resembled football plays drawn by an orangutan with arthritis") transfer intact. A glorious spy career, a return visit from his problematic father, and several sequels are undoubtedly in Max Segredo's future.