Artemis Fowl and The Arctic Incident

Artemis Fowl and The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer is a cold, fast, very clever thriller for 10 year olds, and it is the one where the boy criminal mastermind finally has something to lose.

What happens

Artemis is thirteen now. He has spent two years and an enormous amount of the family fortune on Russian search companies, local informants and anything else that might tell him what happened to his father.

The book opens by telling you. Two years ago, on a freezing quay in Murmansk, two men who work for the Russian mafia stand arguing about the ship they were sent to sink and the fact that they made a mess of it. A survivor is carried up from a ravine. Frostbitten hands, one leg hanging wrong, his face badly burned. They go through his pockets, find a bank card, read the name on it and start making phone calls. He is, one of them says, their ticket to the big time.

Then we cut to Artemis in a school counsellor's office, taking the man apart for sport.

He identifies the Victorian armchair as a fake inside a minute, purely to derail the session. Doctor Po writes it all down and then lands one properly. The problem, he says, is that you don't respect anyone enough to treat them as an equal.

That's why these books work. Artemis is brilliant and not especially nice, and the story keeps quietly showing him the cost of that. Meanwhile there is a goblin uprising brewing underground, somebody has been supplying the goblins with human technology, and Holly Short is fairly sure she knows exactly which thirteen-year-old is responsible.

For once, he isn't. He's busy with the Arctic.

Your reader gets fairy technology, a proper heist structure, jokes that are dry rather than daft, and a plot that runs on two timelines until they collide.

Do read the prologue yourself before you hand it over, because it is bleak. A man is pulled out of the snow with burns and a ruined leg while two criminals discuss whether he will survive the night and how much he is worth. The villains here are ordinary human gangsters with guns, alongside the goblins, and Colfer does not soften them much. A reader who found the first book's kidnapping fine will be fine with this. A reader who is squeamish about injury might not be.

What to read next

Start at the beginning, though. This one opens on the deal Artemis made at the end of the last one and never explains it twice, so the first Artemis Fowl book is the place to go first.