Nightshade

Anthony Horowitz's Nightshade is an Alex Rider thriller for 11 year olds that begins with a poisoned chocolate muffin.

What happens

Alex is flying home from a weekend in Amsterdam with Jack. He's back at school and he's sure his spying days are behind him. The very next line tells you he's wrong!

Down below, in a pretty village on the Thames, two girls in Girl Guide shirts are selling homemade muffins. A retired politician buys one at his front gate. Nobody suspects a thing. And a group called Nightshade has just taken its first step towards an attack on London.

At MI6, things aren't looking good for Alex either. Mrs Jones is called in by a cold, whiny boss at the Foreign Office who's furious that a schoolboy was ever used as a spy. She's ordered never to contact Alex again. Her last thought on the drive back? Unless she goes behind his back.

Then it's off to Rio. Crawley from MI6 meets a terrified agent in a park while two kids fly a model Spitfire nearby (it's a lot more dangerous than it looks). The agent manages one word before he dies, and you can probably guess which one.

Alex is barely in these opening chapters. Instead you hop between Mrs Jones, Crawley and the Brazilian police, and you know far more than Alex does. That's what makes it so tense. The killers are children who look completely harmless, which is a properly creepy idea.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one is very violent, even for the top of this shelf. A man is poisoned, an agent's throat is cut, and a fifteen-year-old prisoner kills guards with a needle hidden in his earring and blades hidden in his glasses. If your reader is upset by violence, or by children who kill, it'll be too much.

If they've already raced through the earlier Alex Rider books and want more, they'll be gripped. It's very much a late book in the series though. The opening chapters recap lots of old missions and give away how some of them end. So if your reader is new to Alex, start with Stormbreaker instead.

What to read next

If spy stories with a nasty opening are their thing, try SilverFin. It has a young James Bond as a nervous new boy at Eton, and it starts with a very scary prologue of its own.