Skeleton Key By Anthony Horowitz




This adventure book called Skeleton Key is about a boy named Alex Rider who grew up without parents in Britain. His uncle Ian raised him but one day he was murdered. The walls all came down on Alex when he realized that his uncle was a spy working for the MI6. The MI6 is the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service and Alex doesn't want to participate in the missions but they know how skilled he is at being an agent.
The author of this book really helped me imagine every little detail that he wrote about. This book is based on two different missions that Alex performed. He was assigned to one mission that is to look around at the Wimbledon tennis tournament which starts out fun for him in the beginning, but gets more intense by the end. His second mission is to act as a young boy who is on vacation with his mother and father. Alex's so- called “parents” named Belinda (the mom) and the other named Glen (the dad) are two experienced agents working for the CIA.
To Alex it is frustrating that the MI6 and CIA make him feel obligated to participate in their missions because he has to look into the eyes of evil and had almost been killed several times throughout the book. To him he is just a schoolboy, not a teenage undercover agent. At one point in the book Alex faces a man at gun-point, this man was called Conrad. All of these thoughts about never working for the MI6 again began to flow through his mind but all of the sudden he is saved by a man he had never seen before.

In Alex's missions he gets to travel all over the world. He got to go to Cuba, Wimbledon, The Cornish coast and to an old sugar plant that was changed to a Soviet nuclear base. The person who assigns him to his missions is a man named Alan Blunt. Alex receives gadgets from a man that works with Blunt called Smithers. Some of the gadgets that he receives are explosive bubble gum, a game boy with a bomb finder built in to it, a Tiger Woods figurine that has a stun grenade built in to it and more.
This book is a page turner and will keep your eyes opened wide all the way through it. It is a perfect book for a middle schooler because it is intense, thrilling and a very fun read. If you like books that have intense action, secret agents and cool gadgets, then Skeleton Key is the one for you.