Scorpia

Anthony Horowitz's Scorpia is a spy thriller for 11 year olds that sends Alex Rider to Venice on a school trip, secretly trying to find out who his father really was.

What happens

Alex is fourteen and he's hardly been at school all year. His teachers have been handed doctor's notes. His best mate Tom has heard he's in therapy, or possibly in trouble with the police. The truth is that MI6 keeps borrowing him for missions, and the last one only ended a few weeks ago.

Now a secret about his dad has sent him looking for something called Scorpia. He has five days in Venice to find it.

The book wastes no time. In the first chapter two bag snatchers on a scooter come roaring across a square, and Alex stops them with a bucket of birdseed and a few hundred pigeons. It's very clever and very funny, and it sets the tone for a hero who thinks on his feet.

Then a silver scorpion on the side of a passing boat catches his eye. He chases it across the city, pole-vaults onto a water bus with a gondolier's oar, and ends up outside a palace getting ready for a masked ball.

Your reader also gets to see what Alex can't. Scorpia's board meets in a room with no windows. Its members are ex-spies and assassins, and they're planning something truly horrible in London.

Be aware that this gets much darker than Alex's pigeon trick suggests. The villains plan to kill thousands of children and talk about it very calmly. An old man on the board who wants to retire is killed on the page, stung by a box full of scorpions. There's backstory about a house fire with a family inside and a husband who fell from a window.

For a confident reader it's a proper page-turner for a reader who loves gadgets, chases and villains they can really hate. A reader who's upset by cruelty might be better waiting a while.

What to read next

This is the fifth Alex Rider book, and it picks up right after the last one, full of references to earlier missions. If your reader hasn't met Alex yet, start at the very beginning with Stormbreaker, where a knock at the door at three in the morning turns his life upside down.