Stormbreaker

Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker is a spy thriller for 11 year olds that starts with the doorbell ringing at three in the morning.

What happens

Alex Rider is fourteen. His uncle Ian is the only family he's ever known, and now the police are saying Ian has been killed in a crash. He wasn't wearing a seat belt, they say.

Alex doesn't believe it for a second. His uncle wouldn't drive him round the corner without making him buckle up.

So he goes looking. There's a man at the funeral with a gun under his jacket. The locked office at home is suddenly empty. And at a scrapyard, Alex finds his uncle's car full of bullet holes.

Ian wasn't a banker at all. He was a spy, and the people he worked for have been watching Alex. Now they want him to finish Ian's last job. It involves a very rich man who's giving a free computer to every secondary school in the country. What's the catch? That's what Alex has to find out.

It moves SO fast. Within a few chapters Alex has escaped from a car crusher (while he's inside the car), climbed out onto a flagpole fifteen floors up and been knocked out with a dart. When the head of MI6 finally explains, Alex asks if he means like James Bond.

He's cheeky with grown-ups who are used to being obeyed, and that's half the fun. He's also quietly sad. He realises he hardly knew his uncle at all.

It's properly violent for this shelf, which is worth knowing. The uncle was murdered, there are dark stains on the car seats, and someone takes a shot at Alex as he escapes. A reader who's upset by guns, or by a child losing the one grown-up he had, might find the opening hard going.

For a reader who loves action and doesn't mind danger, it's hard to beat. It's very much a one-more-chapter book.

What to read next

If they're hooked, Point Blanc is the second Alex Rider book. It opens in New York, with a very rich man worried about his son's school and a phone call to Alan Blunt at MI6.