Russian Roulette

Anthony Horowitz's Russian Roulette is a dark thriller for 11 year olds that tells the life story of Yassen Gregorovich, the contract killer from the Alex Rider books.

What happens

It opens in a London hotel room, where Yassen checks the door handle for fingerprints and the single hair he left across the crack. Then a coded message pops up on his laptop. Three words. KILL ALEX RIDER.

He'll do it in the morning. But first he sits back and opens a secret diary, written in Russian. From there the story goes back to his own boyhood, told in his own words.

He wasn't even called Yassen then. Yasha is fourteen and lives in a tiny village six hundred miles from Moscow. There's no running water, so he trudges to the well three times a day. He dreams of flying helicopters.

His best friend Leo is hopeless at lessons and brilliant at taking a rifle apart (twelve seconds, apparently). They once blew a tyre off a police car with a homemade booby trap.

Then one quiet Sunday there's a bang from the factory where his parents work. Gunfire follows. His mum and dad come racing home in a car full of bullet holes, and within minutes Yasha is running for his life.

It's a very strange feeling, reading it. You start with a man so careful he knows his briefcase sits 4.6 centimetres from the edge of the desk. Then you're inside the head of a skinny village boy groaning his way through Crime and Punishment for school. How do you get from one to the other? That's the question that keeps you turning the pages.

Alex himself only turns up in Yassen's memories in these opening chapters. The prologue leans on what happened in Stormbreaker, so if your reader hasn't met Alex yet, start there.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is told from a killer's side and it doesn't look away. Yassen remembers shooting a frightened guard in the chest for dropping a box, and he's quite calm about being ordered to kill a fourteen-year-old. Young Yasha drinks vodka and smokes with Leo as if it's nothing. And the day the factory goes wrong is frightening, with his father shot and bleeding in front of him.

A reader who's upset by guns, or by a child seeing his parents badly hurt, might find this one too much. If they've already raced through the Alex Rider books and want to know what made Yassen who he is, they'll be gripped.

What to read next

If they like seeing a famous hard man before he was one, try SilverFin. It's James Bond as a new boy at Eton, hating the noisy crowds and unable to get his hair to lie flat.