THE TERMINALS

A teen with a year to live is recruited into an elite team of dying 19-year-old spies.

Cam Cody is a soccer star finishing up his senior year of high school when he’s diagnosed with a rare kind of brain tumor by a secretive traveling doctor. Though he feels perfectly healthy, his despair is overwhelming. When a mysterious man offers him a job as a one-year spy kid, the choice seems obvious: Let the creepy spies fake his premature death and spirit him off to the opportunity of, well, a lifetime. On a beach surrounded by cliffs and jungle, Cam meets the nine other members of his team, all as distinctive as if they were the cast of a miniseries. There’s the genius, the musician, the big lunkhead and “the hot gal” (also known as “Obviously female,” “a goddamned beer commercial. James Bond with boobs,” and “definitely not repressed”). All Cam’s teammates take the drug TS-9, which enhances their speed, strength and smarts, but Cam’s been assured he doesn’t need the drug yet. The team’s spy training is brutal, but their missions are rewarding, such as rescuing kidnapped humanitarian-aid doctors from pirates. They are humanitarian-aid doctors, right? Team members keep getting killed—sometimes under very suspicious circumstances—but they all have only a year to live, after all. Solving the mystery with only the most heavily foreshadowed characters left alive leads to a shoehorned lead-in for the next volume.

For readers who want cinematic action and excitement without the fuss of character development