Kensy and Max: Time’s Up by Jacqueline Harvey

Title: Kensy and Max: Time’s Up

Author: Jacqueline Harvey

Genre: Mystery, spies

Publisher: Puffin

Published: 2^nd May 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 400

Price: $16.99

Synopsis: The tenth and final book in the bestselling spy series!

When all of your family members are being kidnapped, how do you push aside your fear and discover what’s happening before time runs out . . .

Someone has been plotting to bring down the Spencers ever since Kensy and Max were thrust into the secret world of Pharos, but they’ve always managed to stay one step ahead of their attackers . . . until now.

As members of the twins’ inner circle – and Pharos’s top agents – start to go missing, it quickly becomes clear that someone is staging a coup. Soon Kensy and Max are on their own, racing to get to the bottom of the terrible situation before the organisation completely falls apart. And before their family is gone forever.

~*~

Gear up – the final Kensy and Max book is here. And the spy-in-training twins are thrown into the deep end of spy craft and Pharos as they keep trying to stay one step ahead of their attackers that have been pursuing them and their family since the start of the series, when the twins were eleven and they arrived in London after the disappearance of their parents. Now thirteen, Kensy and Max are slowly watching their entire family disappear and rumours of a coup within Pharos begins to arise. Unsure of who to trust, the twins are alone – trying to find their family, work out who to trust, and trying to find out who would want to oust the Spencer from Pharos – and it seems the world.

Ever since 2018, readers have been following the exploits of Kensy and Max Spencer, who entered the world of Pharos in the first book, Breaking News. And after ten books, every clue that has been dropped, every red herring that has been thrown at Kensy, Max, and their family, and everyone they have ever come into contact with will come to a head. After ten books and two years, everything is coming together, and I think it will be interesting to go back and read it from the beginning, because it seems the people who I thought they could trust might not be very trustworthy, and others who seemed like they were working behind the scenes of things at times, maybe not as active as the others. Yet it was these characters – two in particular – that I loved seeing coming out of their shells a bit more in this book with our heroes. In doing so and allowing Kensy and Max to have very few allies in this book upped the stakes – putting the sea monster in, as Allison Tait calls it. Of course, in Kensy and Max adventures, there are always high stakes. But this time, everything possible is thrown at the twins. And the rising coup simmers throughout as scarab beetles start to appear all over with those that are left at Pharos and the twins’ school. As a reader, I have come to love Kensy and Max, their parents, Granny Cordelia, Monty, Reff, and many other characters – and I felt like I had to get through it. At first I was translating the chapter headings from one code into another and then decoding that, but I did stop because I was too eager to find out what was happening to everyone in the book. I have been following Kensy and Max since the beginning and have always known it was going to have an ending – it was a matter of when and how. Ten books is a perfect number – we get to see the world, learn about codes and ciphers, and have great adventures whilst our heroic twins takedown everyone out to get them and their family and face down every threat. There is one character who appears in each book – and I recall there being times I wasn’t quite sure what they were up to or what their motivations were – they didn’t seem to fit in with everyone else in the books all the time.

Everything has come together in this book, and allowed everything the twins have learnt to be pulled together in one novel and it has been lovely to watch them grow as spies and find their family. And like any good crime series, even when you think one bad guy is gone, there is another in the wings, or one who is pulling the strings of all the others – and I’ve been enjoying seeing the different ways this occurs throughout a range of novels and series like Kensy and Max. The Kensy and Max series is one that needs to be read in order – there are so many clues and pieces of information that cross over every book. And there is the ongoing story thread about who wants to oust the Spencers, which simmers along until the last few books when the pieces of the puzzle start to fall together and nothing is really a coincidence in the final book, Time’s Up. Ghosts and secrets are also coming back – people they thought were dead, people who were meant to be in jail, and people they weren’t sure they can trust become their greatest allies as Kensy and Max seek to save their family and ensure Pharos remains safe.

I liked that Kensy, Max, and their friends drove this series – the adults were there as allies and guides, but the children took charge of all the action, and got into all the scrapes, saved the day, and uncovered what was really going on. They never gave up on each other or themselves, but they were also allowed to be human. I think this has been a wonderful series, and had a really great ending that is satisfying and brings everything together neatly. I am looking forward to being able to read them back-to-back to see if I can pick up on the clues that are sprinkled throughout the series and link them up. An excellent Kensy and Max book, and a wonderful way to end the series.