Artemis Fowl, The Atlantis Complex

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl, The Atlantis Complex is a fairy-and-technology thriller for 10 year olds in which the teenage criminal mastermind starts to come apart.

What happens

It opens on a glacier in Iceland. Artemis has hired a closed-for-the-season restaurant, laid five places at one table and invited four fairies to hear how he intends to save the world. It's his fifteenth birthday.

Then you notice what his hands are doing. He clicks the briefcase latch twenty times. He counts toe-taps inside his snow boot. He has decided that five is a good number and that four is the worst one there is.

He knows this is ridiculous. He tells himself so, in his own head, quite sharply.

He carries on counting anyway.

That's the tension running under the whole thing. Artemis is still the cleverest person in any room. He's also negotiating with a part of himself, and his friends spot that something is wrong well before he'll admit it.

(There's no Butler either. Artemis has sent his bodyguard off on family business, which Holly finds very hard to swallow.)

The back-and-forth is as good as ever. Foaly the centaur point blank refuses to be impressed by anything Artemis unpacks, laptop or hologram. Artemis works up a joke from a presentation manual, delivers it to total silence, then explains that it had layers. Holly punches his shoulder and calls him birthday boy.

If your reader is here for gadgets and heists and sarcastic sidekicks, that's all still on. Screens unfold out of briefcases. An elf squadron hovers overhead in a shielded shuttle in case anything goes wrong.

This one sits a long way into the series. The prologue does catch you up though, in a handful of pages, on who Artemis is and how a boy who kidnapped a fairy police captain ended up being friends with her. Your reader won't be stranded.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that a lot of this book is about a mind that isn't working properly, and it doesn't soften that at all. The compulsions are described from inside Artemis's head, including the bit where he can see exactly how irrational he's being and still can't stop. If you've got a child who already worries about their own counting and rituals, this could land a bit close to home. A child who reads it as their favourite genius being unwell and needing his friends around him will probably find it gripping.

What to read next

To go right back to where all this started, the first Artemis Fowl book has him at twelve years old, sweating through Ho Chi Minh City on the word of an informant, looking for a fairy to steal.