Artemis Fowl and The Eternity Code

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and The Eternity Code is a criminal mastermind thriller for 10 year olds about a boy squeezing in one last job before he has to be good.

What happens

Artemis is very nearly content. His father is about to be discharged from a hospital in Helsinki after two years in the hands of the Russian Mafiya. His mother has decided the Fowls are going straight.

Which leaves him a narrow window. One last job, quickly, before there are two parents in the house.

So he's sitting in a Knightsbridge seafood restaurant with an aluminium briefcase, waiting for an American billionaire called Jon Spiro. Inside the case is the C Cube, a little red box Artemis has built out of stolen fairy technology, and it makes every computer on the planet worthless.

His bodyguard Butler has a bad feeling about the whole arrangement. Butler's bad feelings are usually right.

Artemis himself is the reason to read this. He's insufferable and entirely aware of it. Offered the children's menu, he informs the waitress that the menu itself probably tastes better than the food printed on it. He tells Butler there isn't a teenager alive with a vocabulary to match his own. Butler suggests, mildly, that it wouldn't hurt him to be nice occasionally.

You spend the book enjoying him and waiting for him to be taken down a peg, which is a very good way to spend a book.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Chapter one ends with every customer in the restaurant pulling a weapon, and Butler is shot at point-blank range putting himself in front of Artemis. It's written plainly and it hurts. That's right at the start rather than a late twist, so your reader won't be ambushed forty pages from the end, but it is the thing the rest of the story hangs off.

There's also the small matter of Artemis having robbed the fairies in the first place, which means going back and apologising to a police captain he once held hostage. He does not enjoy apologising.

This isn't the place to start. The opening pages look back on two earlier scrapes, the fairy gold and the business with his father, and both are much better met in order.

What to read next

Go and find the first Artemis Fowl book instead. It opens with a psychiatrist who cannot work out what is wrong with a boy who has just decided to restore his family's fortune, and the story is put together from interviews with the people he did it to.