BOOK REVIEW: Crocodile Tears (Anthony Horowitz)

Book: Crocodile Tears

Author: Anthony Horowitz

Rating: 6/10

Recommended age: 14+


In book 8 of the Alex Rider series Alex is once again drawn into danger and mystery by Chance.
Holidaying in Scotland with the Pleasure family, he visits Kilmore Castle with Sabina and her Dad for a new years eve party and her dads research into a article he is writing on the castles owner Desmond McCain,
Chief of a new charity called First Aid after converting to Christianity in prison after he ruined himself getting caught defrauding a insurance company. Everything is fine at the party then Alex beats McCain at a gambling game and wins 25 grand  which he selflessly chooses to donate to the charity.
Then their journey home has a unsettling and abrupt halt as their car plunges deep into Loch Arkaig. Mr Pleasure is unconscious and Alex and Sabina are trapped in a car in a Scottish Loch. Now Alex needs to use his knowledge to get both himself, Sabina and her unconscious Dad to safety. After a very close escape  danger finds Alex again in the form of an attack by his uncles grave.
then the worst bit of trouble turns up right on the  doorstep in the form of freelance journalist Harry Bulman who has been investigating the happening surrounding Alex and has uncovered a substantial amount of facts to fill a book he's going to write about him.

This is going to ruin Alex's life,the media would never leave him alone.

So what choice does Alex have other than return to MI6 for help. they use operation "Invisible Man" to force Bulman to stop writing the article by making it appear he's died and that he is his own psychopathic killer.
All MI6 want in return is another simple favour: on a school trip to a GM factory he has to download the contents of the boss Straiks computer for MI6 to analyse. But it gets complicated as he gets stuck in a tiny hiding place as Straik and McCain are both their and discussing a strange operation as they realise the pc has been compromised. what follows is a chase through the complex and into the Poison Dome a place filled with poisonous plants and animals that have been modified to be hundreds of times more dangerous than nature intended. he ends up blowing up a chimney and sliding down it back onto a school coach just as it leaves. This of course through the injustice shown to Alex throughout the series lands him in trouble with the school.and he gets suspended.

This isn't as bad as it may seem though as it gives him a chance to follow a lead he heard during his eavesdropping on McCain and Straik. about a shooting on Elms Cross.He goes to the film studio there and sees a set based on Africa with dead and starving looking people and animals. Yet another piece of the puzzle. Then the studio bursts into flame and Alex is surrounded by a inferno as the struggles to escape through a air vent.

Meanwhile McCain is enquiring into Alex Rider and who does he meet but Harry Bluman who tells him everything in his last conversation as a living human.

Alex rider is walking home when the deliveryman turns up in the van next thing he know he's trying to fight off a group of kidnappers who drug him and take him to McCain's outpost in the desert.
Surrounded by Guards he finds out the plan to start a huge plague in Kenya with poisoned wheat and then gets left to be eaten by crocodiles.

Saved by a member of Indian RAW he sets off to blow up the huge Simba dam therefore destroying the wheat, but pursued he sets the bomb then gets surrounded halfway up with very little time left.

Bang, the bomb explodes washing away the wheat and half the guards then as Alex accepts death the RAW agent flies past in a plane and manages to get Alex to safety.
They land and everything is fine then McCain arrives and shoots killing the agent but not Alex, fuel is leaking all over from shattered tanks and planes and Alex looks set to die when  the fuel catches light burning McCain and splattering all over. McCain is dead,Alex is alive but has got burns all over his back.
But most importantly he survived.



This  book was ok but i felt the plot was too similar to Eagle strike and Skeleton Key(books 3+4) with Alex being put through all the mystery and torture, being smuggled from country to country and ending in an airport. That being said it's still a very good read with surprise and excitement all the way through,I felt that it was slightly disappointing in the scope of the whole series of books . Still a ok read in a good series.


Hope you found this review helpful,

The Devonian Book Reviewer


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