Never Say Die

Anthony Horowitz's Never Say Die is an Alex Rider thriller for 11 year olds that kicks off with an enormous helicopter vanishing into thin air.

What happens

At an air show in Suffolk, a woman dressed as a first aid volunteer kills two pilots and flies off in a giant American helicopter. MI6 tracks it over Felixstowe. Then it's simply gone. (There's a clue tucked into the last line of that chapter, if your reader likes spotting things!)

Meanwhile Alex is five thousand miles away in San Francisco. He's living with his friend Sabina's family and has just started at an American high school. Everyone loves his accent. Nobody knows a thing about him.

And he's not doing well. He's hardly eating. He has the same nightmare every night about a mission in Egypt that went terribly wrong. He's learned to tell his school counsellor exactly what she wants to hear.

Then an odd three-word email lands from an account he's never heard of. Alex is sure it's from Jack Starbright, the housekeeper who looked after him for years. Before long he's written a goodbye letter to the family and he's off to find out the truth on his own, without a word to MI6.

It's a different Alex at the start, quieter and lonelier, and you really feel for him. Little things land, like Sabina already saying math instead of maths. (He notices, of course.)

There are two bullies at school who've made him their daily project. Alex is a black belt in karate. Watching him decide NOT to use it is quite something.

This comes late in the series and follows straight on from that mission in Egypt. If your reader is new to Alex, it isn't the place to start.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The pilots are killed on the page with poisoned needles, quickly and coldly, and the woman who does it would happily have killed more. Alex's nightmares are vivid and upsetting. The bullies jeer at him about his mum, who died when he was a baby.

A reader who's been bullied might find those school scenes a bit close to home. For a reader who has stuck with Alex all this way, seeing him so low makes it even more gripping when he decides to act.

What to read next

If they've never met him, Stormbreaker is where it all began. Alex is fourteen, the doorbell rings at three in the morning, and it's Jack who goes down to answer it.