SPY GIRL (2016)

Spy Girl, aka X, is an agent of Black X.

That tells you a whole lot of nothing but is pretty much the truth, as far as it goes.

Black X is a ultra-secret American intelligence agency so hush-hush that not even the President knew of its existence. It is referred to as a 'double-black covert group".

X is the codename given the young woman who is the protagonist, and the chief narrator, of these adventures. A couple of officials at the school where she is enrolled refer to her by the name Xanthamum (meaning unknown) so likely the 'X' comes from that. The school in question is the Blackwood Academy and it holds more than 26 students so how she got a single letter as a designation is not revealed.

We learn early on that Blackwood is a facility designed to be a "combination of higher education, clandestine training, boot camp, and finishing school. Its graduates would be elite, intelligent, and most of all, lethal". The current head of the school has been with the organization as long as X has been.

X has been a student with them for the past six years, ever since she was 12 and her parents were murdered. "Her beautiful mother had been shot, execution style, in front of her by the most deadly assassin in the world, a man known only as The Priest. And somehow, she managed to shoot and wound the assassin, fight him off, and then escape. A feat not even the most seasoned agent had ever accomplished. Two days later, she defied death again, when a bomb blew up her father's car. She wasn't allowed to attend their funerals. Spies don't have funerals".

The adventures start when she is only a month or two from formal graduation, at which she is slated to be the valedictorian since she had "the school's highest scores in everything from parkour to the number of ways I can kill a man". Before she can complete her normal lessons she is pulled out of class for her first official mission and her life will change dramatically.

For that first assignment she will be given the mouthful of a name, Huntley Penelopy 'Penny' Bond-Von Allister and she will use that Huntley alias throughout her recorded career. And what an interesting career that will be.

At first I thought this was a young adult series about a teenage spy. Wrong. Well, technically since she is 18 at the time it begins, she is still a teenager but when we read right off the bat about how her mother is killed with a gun shot to the forehead and the young daughter then shoots and wounds the assailant, we know it is not meant for youngsters. Then we learn on page two that she has a problem with a fellow student at the academy because he whispers 'three little words' to her while they are have sex and she knows students are allowed to fool around but not get emotionally attached.

But what kind of a series it actually was still had not been determined because that sexual escapade was referred not, not described. Plus the feel of the stories was a bit on the light side of heavy. To make sure I understood what I would be writing about here, I read on.

And I am still reading - more later.