AFTER TWO LONG YEARS, Alex Rider, reluctant teenage spy, is back with a bang. His escape pod from the exploded satellite station Ark Angel has fallen Down Under, and no sooner has he landed than the Australian Secret Service has enrolled him for some deadly undercover work in the Far East involving Chinese criminal gangs and the criminal masterminds of Scorpia. Hurrah! Harry Potter may be gone, but Alex Rider is perpetually 14. One hopes that, like Peter Pan, he never grows up.

Alex has all his adventures packed into one explosive year, and a couple of books back he was, not surprisingly, getting rather emotionally worn even before his GCSE coursework began. This, though by far his most chilling adventure, has him react with less feeling and more ingenuity, which is on balance a mistake. If Smithers, MI6's benign inventor, once again gives him three life-saving gadgets of ingenious plausibility, Alex needs to use his brains to save himself when one of them fails to work. Convincingly disguised as an Afghan refugee, he is smuggled from Thailand to Indonesia, and then the Australian Outback, in a fiendishly complex assignment.

His reason for doing it is that, far from serving Queen and country, he wants to find out more about his murdered parents from his father's former colleague, Ash, the handsome, tough agent who is his godfather. It is often pointed out that all major children's heroes and heroines are orphans, but the sadder fact is that they are almost always betrayed by those adults whom they seek to fill the parental role. Ash is no different.

The deprivation of Bangkok, Jakarta and those living in extreme poverty is depicted with savage accuracy, and one of the worst moments is when Alex is simply packed in a container on a ship bound for Jakarta with 20 other refugees being smuggled in by the gang.

Snakehead goes deeper than any previous book, either by Horowitz or his rivals in the spy kids trade, in its vivid portrayal of pure evil. Previously, Alex has had to battle the usual Bondian cast list of crazed megalomaniac billionaires. However, the trade in human body parts that lies at the heart of the story is real, and extends, horrifyingly, to children. “You're going to have a lot of surgery, Alex. There are some bad days ahead. But you'll come through... I know you will. We'll help you to the finishing line,” the cheery Aussie doctor Tanner tells him. As a piece of dramatic writing on this subject, I found it far more impressive than Ishiguro's Booker-listed novel Never Let Me Go. It deserves prizes as well as sales.

Horowitz, and the best spy kids authors such as Charlie Higson, Joe Craig and Robert Muchamore are too often dismissed as pulp fiction when in fact they are outstanding at both writing and plotting. Far too many adults think that children should read books as a kind of Weetabix for the brain rather than because they give pleasure. These writers will, however, lead young readers on to Dickens and Dostoevsky. (If your child is reluctant, try the brilliant audiobook recordings from Naxos and Assembled Stories — the latter, a new venture, includes The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Prisoner of Zenda and Moonfleet.) They share the same understanding that the best kind of story is the one we all need when growing up — about being alone in a dangerous world, with nobody but ourselves to rely on. Horowitz is right up there with Buchanan, Conan Doyle and H.Rider Haggard, and Alex Rider's seventh adventure proves it.

Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz
Walker, £12.99; 400pp

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