“The dark blue Jaguar XJ Sentinel looked no different from the other cars that surrounded it as it swept around Buckingham Palace and continued through St James’s Park.”

From Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider: Nightshade.

Fifteen-year-old Alex Rider had hoped that his time as a teen spy for MI6 was finished with his last life-threatening mission, but the deadly plans of a new terrorist organization called Nightshade quickly pulls him back in.  When Mrs. Jones of MI6’s Special Operations realizes that Nightshade is using a small army of child assassins, she goes behind her supervisor’s back and to bring in Alex as her only chance to stop Nightshade’s terrorist plans.  MI6 knows that Nightshade is planning a soon-coming attack on London, but the when and how are a deadly mystery.  Mrs. Jones hates to use Alex again, but when she learns something surprising about one of the Nightshade operators, she and her trusted coworker, Crawley, ask Alex to risk everything to impersonate deceased criminal Julius Grief at a MI6 black site so Alex can get close to a captured Nightshade operative named Freddy.  When Alex arrives as the eighth inmate at the secret prison, he quickly find the while Julius’ previous fellow inmates want to kill him, it is nothing compared to the difficulty of getting Freddy to open up to him.  Through Alex’s clever work, Freddy offers to let Alex join him in a prison escape with the possibility of then joining Nightshade.  However, when Alex is brought into Nightshade, he faces the impossible, life-threatening task of gathering information on the secret organization and their fast-approaching terrorist plot.

While the book is fairly long, Horowitz writes in a very detailed, action-packed manner that moves the story along quickly.  The thirteenth book in the Alex Rider series is full of the same action, adventure, and mysterious suspense that fans have come to expect from the teen spy books.  Nightshade is a captivating adventure that will have readers desperate for the next installment in the series.