Crocodile Tears - Anthony Horowitz - Chapter 1 Fire Star

Can I just say that I am SO EXCITED for this book! I first read the Alex Rider series when I was about 14, so I was quite late in getting into them but MY GOSH THEY ARE SO GOOD. I read one to six pretty quickly, and I got seven when that came out and this one, number 8, Crocodile Tears, came out a while ago but for some reason I never read it. I know it's a children's book but anyone who's read these books will understand how friggin amazing they are. So I've decided to ration this one out. There is another one after this which I'll read once I've finished, but that's it. I need to savour it because these books, like Harry Potter are suspenseful, exciting and downright wonderful. So I'm going to do this CHAPTER BY CHAPTER: that is I'll read one chapter a day and write one post a day. It will probably kill me, as pretty much every other chapter ends on a cliff hanger, but it's worth it. So here goes!

Chapter 1: Fire Star
This Chapter, like most in the Alex Rider series opens with a stranger. Here we are following Ravi, an Indian man who works in a Nuclear Power Plant, and we know instantly that he is up to something. Alex's life, if you didn't know, has been taken over by MI6 every since he was fourteen and he has so far been sent on six missions by them, the CIA and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and one on his own. So we know that any cold open is going to involve some kind of dodginess that will come into play later. Watch this space.

Ravi has been told that he will be payed a lot of money if he will blow up this power station. You might be thinking why would anyone do such a thing, but Horowitz is always able to loacte the humanity of a character, and he uses this to tell us why someone might agree to such an awful task. Ravi's not particularly well off, and he has a family who he loves very much and wants to provide for them. He has been reassured that few, if any, people will be harmed in this task, and the people he is working with he believes have no reason to lie.

We follow him as he goes to work, talking to colleagues and friends about "the game last night" (I have very little knowledge/interest in sport, so I'm guessing this was football/cricket - he mentioned he wanted to go to Lords) and this humanises him, as well as knowing his background. We come to like him, but still worry about what he's doing: has he been told the whole truth or just tricked into doing this?

He goes into the main reactor room (it is described to vividly, along with everything else in these books: it's obvious that Horowitz thoroughly researches everything he writes about) and he opens this emergency door. This makes it clear that what he's doing is defintely going to harm people, as he's opening a way to the outside: allowing for radiation to leak into the open and spread. This shows us that there's something going on that neither he nor we know about. He's also been told that he'll have a 10 second gap between pressing the button and the bomb going off. That's a lie. As soon as flicks the switch the bomb detonates, killing him and all the other people in the plant, and quickly endangering the lives of everyone else in the city.

It ends describing the inevitable help coming from other countries, and we are left to imagine what happens to his family ourselves. The best line though is at the end, when Horowitz writes, "Of course, if the disaster had been greater, they [the people donating money] would have raised much, much more." This shows how we sort of suck up disaster. Think about the news: I read somewhere that last year only 8% of news reported was good news. We relish the thought that people are worse off than ourselves, and have this awful fascination with reading about the terrible things that happen when we're safe at home.

Overall, an excellent start to what looks to be an epic book, and I can't wait to read more!!