Scorpia Rising

Anthony Horowitz's Scorpia Rising is a dark, high-stakes spy thriller for 11 year olds, and it's the ninth Alex Rider book.

What happens

It starts with the villains, not with Alex. The head of Scorpia flies into London for a secret meeting at the British Museum, with MI6 trailing him all the way.

A dying Greek billionaire is waiting by the Elgin Marbles. He wants those ancient statues sent home to Athens, and he'll pay forty million euros to make it happen. (The British government has always said no.)

The meeting goes badly wrong on the way out. There's a shoot-out in the Great Court while a class of primary school children hides by the stairs.

Then we meet Razim, the man Scorpia picks to run the job. He's small and silver-haired, with glasses a little too big for his face. He also feels nothing at all. He lives in an old French fort in the Egyptian desert and wants to invent a unit for measuring pain (named after himself, of course).

Alex isn't in these opening chapters at all. But Scorpia hasn't forgotten the fourteen-year-old who wrecked its last two plans. And Razim mentions, very casually, that a teenager would be useful for his experiments. Chilling.

From there the story heads into the Middle East, and this time Scorpia is coming for Alex in a way it never has before.

It reads like a grown-up action film, and you always know more than the good guys do. And the gadgets are pure Horowitz. Who else would hide a gun inside a walking stick?

Please don't skip this bit. It's VERY violent, even by Alex Rider standards. In the museum one agent is killed with a sharpened paintbrush, another has his neck snapped and one is blown off his feet. Razim's own backstory includes strangling his pet dog as a boy and handing his parents to Saddam Hussein's police, who shoot them. Then he ties a French agent to a chair and starts on him (we hear the screams, not the details).

There's real-world terrorism in here too, with the Iraq war, al-Qaeda and a suicide belt. It sits right at the very top of this shelf. If your reader is upset by cruelty, or by wars they've seen on the news, it's one to save for later.

If they've grown up with Alex and can take the darkness, they'll be desperate to see what Scorpia has planned. If they haven't met him yet, go back to Stormbreaker first, because this one leans on everything that came before.

What to read next

If they love the idea of a teenager the spies just won't leave alone, try Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation. The CIA is so desperate to find a secret Albert Einstein hid that it wants to send a twelve-year-old girl after it.