The Codebreaker Kids

Three friends form a codebreaking service and meet a motley cast of characters including a Bulgarian spy, a man from the State Department, and a little old lady who wants her diary encoded.

Grade 4-8 The influence of Daniel Pinkwater looms large in this off-the-wall but very funny spy mystery. Three Washington, D.C. kids open the Secret Code Service, offering to encode or decode messages for needy spies. The Service is overrun with customers, including an elderly lady who wants to encode her romantic diary entries to hide them from her snoopy younger sister, and Boris the Bad Bulgarian, a spy who makes Maxwell Smart look like James Bond. There are coded messages to solve throughout the story, and readers can actually learn a number of codes. Adults may scratch their heads over this one, but middle grade code fanatics will love it! Elaine E. Knight, Lincoln Elementary Schools, Ill.
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