Skeleton Key

Anthony Horowitz's Skeleton Key is a fast, twisty spy thriller for 11 year olds that sends teenage agent Alex Rider undercover as a ballboy at Wimbledon.

What happens

It's Alex's third mission, and he really doesn't want it. MI6 has used him twice already and he's made his mind up. He's a schoolboy, not a spy.

So when an MI6 man called Crawley turns up at his school football match with a strange white dog, Alex is ready to say no. But Crawley isn't asking him to do anything dangerous. Someone broke into the All England Club without taking anything, and he just wants a pair of sharp eyes at the tennis for two weeks. Front-row seats at Wimbledon? What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Top players start losing matches they should have won, looking half asleep. A security guard with a strange red tattoo keeps hanging around the water coolers with a phone that isn't really a phone. And Alex gets far too curious for his own good.

Alex is great company. He's brave and clever but he's also a normal teenager. He's grumpy about being used, he enjoys a Coke with his friend Sabina, and he knows he's been an idiot the second he's walked into a trap.

It moves along at a real pace. Horowitz is brilliant at putting you right there, in the roar of Centre Court or the smelly tunnels under it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The book opens with a short, grim prologue on Skeleton Key itself, an island in the Caribbean. A general buys stolen uranium, tricks the smugglers' little plane into a swamp, and then watches crocodiles swarm over it with the men still inside. There are guns, there's a bomb threat and there's a nasty chase with a forklift truck.

If your reader is fine with a proper action film in book form, they'll love it. A more sensitive child might want to skip ahead of that first chapter, or save the series for a year or two.

What to read next

If this is the first Alex Rider book in your house, it's worth going back to where it all began. Stormbreaker opens with police at the door at three in the morning, telling fourteen-year-old Alex that the uncle who raised him has died, and a seat belt that doesn't add up.