Ark Angel

Ark Angel by Anthony Horowitz is a spy thriller for 10 year olds, and it opens with Alex Rider flat on his back in a hospital bed.

He is fourteen. He has been shot. The bullet went in half a centimetre higher than the sniper intended, because Alex happened to step off a kerb at the exact moment it was fired.

That is how the book starts. Not with a gadget. With a boy who very nearly died doing a job no fourteen year old should be doing.

He goes home tomorrow. He is reading a French textbook he should have finished for school. A nurse who is not allowed to ask him any questions is doing her best not to ask him questions.

Elsewhere, a group calling themselves Force Three would like you to believe they are on the side of the planet. They have just killed a security expert on a London pavement in broad daylight, by ringing his mobile phone.

Then Alex meets the son of a Russian billionaire, and that one chance meeting drops him into an international manhunt and eventually a long way above the ground.

You never get the feeling Alex is enjoying any of this. He is tired. He is fed up with the adults who keep using him. The action is properly fast and there are some brilliant set pieces, but what it costs him is always right there on the page. That is what makes these different from ordinary adventure stories.

If you have got a reader who has outgrown treasure and pirates and wants something with real danger in it, this is the shelf they are heading for.

Worth knowing before you say yes. This one is violent. A man is blown up in the first few pages and it is described plainly. People are shot. Alex's own injury is explained in medical detail, including exactly what the bullet did to the artery above his lung. Nothing is gory for the sake of it and nothing is softened either.

For a confident 10 or 11 year old who already reads action, that honesty is the appeal. For a more sensitive reader, or one who takes things to bed with them, this is one to leave for a year or two.

It is also the sixth Alex Rider book and it looks back at how he came to be in that hospital bed, so a reader who likes things in order should start earlier in the series.

Snakehead is the next job, and it sends Alex undercover for the Australian secret service, into the people-smuggling gangs of South-East Asia, with an old enemy waiting for him and nobody at all he can trust.