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Anthony Horowitz's Snakehead is a big, globe-trotting Alex Rider thriller for 11 year olds that drops the teenage spy into the sea near Australia with no way home.
Alex is fished out of the Pacific in a capsule at the very start, sick, dizzy and desperate to get back to London. He's fourteen. The sailors who pull him out can hardly believe it.
He isn't going anywhere, though. Australia's secret service has read his file and thinks a teenager would be perfect for a job of their own. Nobody would suspect a kid. All they need is a way to persuade him.
Meanwhile, back in London, a criminal organisation called Scorpia is meeting above a funeral parlour. Their plan is to wipe out eight famous people at a charity summit on an island off Australia, and make it look like a natural disaster. To do it they steal a prototype bomb, and a people-smuggling gang in South-East Asia is going to carry it for them.
This is late in the series and it shows. The spy file on Alex lists six earlier missions. Old enemies and past cases come up again and again in the opening chapters, and a lot of the fun is in recognising them. Alex is tired of being used and doesn't know who to trust, and you really feel that.
Horowitz is great at switching between Alex and the villains, so you always know a little more than Alex does. That's what keeps you reading. When the friendly Australian soldiers take Alex off for a barbecue on the beach, you already know somebody has orders for the night ahead.
It's worth being clear about the violence. The bomb theft is cold and quick. Two guards are shot, and poison gas is pumped into a building full of technicians. It isn't lingered on, but it's there on the page. The villains are properly nasty too, and the whole thing reads like a grown-up action film.
If your reader has come up through the earlier books, they'll be right at home. If not, it's much better to start at the beginning with Stormbreaker, because this one assumes you know what Alex has been through.
If they want more teenagers doing dangerous secret work, Bodyguard: Hostage is a good fit. A kickboxing champion from London is recruited into a secret team of young bodyguards, while a terror cell in Yemen plots to snatch the US President's daughter.
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