Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead

You can learn a lot of facts just by looking, listening and reading. Seurat painted using dots of colour. Kangaroos don't make a particular sound and Koalas sleep a lot. Benjamin Franklin believed in spelling reform and got rid of six letters of the alphabet. And Georges (the s is silent) was just a normal 7th grader at a normal middle school in the normal suburb of Brooklyn. But when he and his parents move into their new apartment Georges meets a rather abnormal boy, Safer, when he unwittingly joins his spy club. Together the two boys investigate the mysterious Mr. X and slowly Georges begins to discover that not everything in the world of espionage is what it seems. And looking, listening and reading don't always add up to the truth...

Published  by Andersen Press, 2012.

---