James Ponti: Hello. My name is James Ponti and I am the author of the City Spies series. And the newest book in that series is City Spies, Forbidden City.

The series is about a group of five kids who have each fallen through the cracks of their different cultures around the world and they have all been adopted by a British secret agent. He comes across them, sees they're in need, can't turn his back on them and so he brings them into his family and, inadvertently at first, he winds up with this family that he knows nothing else but to teach them to become spies. So they become a family of spies. They're an asset of MI6, which is the British version of the CIA, their spy agency. And they go on missions where adults stand out, but kids can blend in.

So in this latest book, what they're doing is they're going on a mission... They're actually going on multiple missions, as they try to make sure that a scientist from North Korea doesn't defect to a bad country and hopefully defects to the United Kingdom. And this mission takes them to Moscow and then to Beijing. And along the way, they have to go undercover at an international chess tournament. There is a plot with a world famous boy band on a world tour and having to go undercover reporting about that for a blog site. There is a code that's really hard to beat and, as with all the books, the issues of five kids trying to become a family, but still being normal kids and having to deal with school work and spy work and battle all that.

This is the ninth book that I've written. And it's the first time that I wrote a book that took place in places that I've not been. So I had to do a lot of research, but the research was really fun. I tracked down people who grew up in these places and who'd lived there, and they could tell me what it was like from a local standpoint. I talked to people who had visited them.

But then I also talked to experts in different fields. So there's a chess plot line. I talked to the people from the US Chess Federation, who set up international tournaments, so I could set up the international tournament as correct as possible. There is obviously spy stuff all the way throughout. I got really lucky. A librarian from Northern Virginia wrote to me once and she said, "I'm a huge fan of your books. My students love your books," et cetera, et cetera. It was a very nice letter. And then at the end she mentioned, "Oh, and by the way, my husband used to run the CIA and if you would like any help..." And I'm like, "Wait a second. What?" He used to run the CIA. He was in charge of all the spies in America. And he ended up helping me plot the spy mission in this book. I wanted it to be realistic. So working on the books is really fun, because I feel like I get to go on these spy adventures with the characters and then hopefully you feel that way when you read them.

And here's an excerpt from the first chapter, Billionaires' Row:

It was dark, and as Paris looked out at the traffic, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the window. There was nothing remarkable about his face. No feature or quirk someone would notice or remember. He'd been born in Rwanda, grew up in Paris, lived in Scotland, and was now in London. And in each of those locations, he'd learned to blend in and disappear. This was an important quality because Paris wasn't just a schoolboy. He was also a spy. Blending in was essential.

Unlike spies in movies, whose modes of transportation ranged from jet packs and mini-submarines to bullet-proof Aston Martins tricked out with rocket launchers, he was headed to his latest mission on a city bus. The number seventy to South Kensington, to be precise. That was the problem with being undercover and underage -- You always needed somebody else to give you a ride.

"This is pathetic," he said, turning to Kat, who was sitting next to him. "Absolutely pathetic."

"What is?" she asked.

He looked around to make sure no one was listening and then leaned in to whisper, "We're about to break into one of the most expensive homes in London to steal a priceless work of art, and our getaway car is a bright red double-decker bus, that has a max speed of five and a half miles an hour."