The Recruit - Robert Muchamore

Title: The Recruit
Author: Robert Muchamore
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 329
Published: 2004

Twelve-year-old James Choke looks all set to wind up in prison as an adult. Raised by a professional shoplifter and her abusive boyfriend, his propensity to violence and vandalism has only been aggravated by his mother's sudden death. His situation in a government home looks bleak – until he wakes up one morning a mysterious facility, to be offered a place at an organisation known only as CHERUB. If he can pass his entrance tests and survive basic training, he'll become one of two hundred and eighty agents, all under the age of seventeen, to take on undercover missions for British Intelligence. The premise of the programme: a criminal will never suspect that children are spying on them.

Aspiring teenage fiction authors take note: if you want to rake in the fans, this is how to do it. Robert Muchamore's CHERUB series has amassed a formidable worldwide following, and one need only open up a copy of The Recruit – the book that started it all – to see why. Muchamore plays shamelessly on every thirteen-year-old boy's closeted longing to be a secret agent. No matter how many times our protagonist, James, is battered, bruised, drowned or nearly killed in training or on missions, readers will still fantasise themselves into his boots, because to be him would be the coolest thing ever. From the descriptions of his former bedroom – so loaded with gaming consoles that 'it looked like a bomb had gone off in Toys R Us' – to the campus full of karate-kids whose job it is to break into terrorists' houses and smash up furniture, every aspect of this novel is hardwired to scream 'teenage guy's dream'.

As fast-paced thrillers go, Muchamore's writing is top-notch. He stumbles a little when it comes to realistic dialogue, but nowhere near enough to unglue his readers from the page. With the help of some convincing (but not cumbersome) background information, a cast of likeable supporting characters and a smattering of brisk humour – all delivered via bite-sized chapters packed with punchy sentences – The Recruit goes from readable to downright addictive without a moment's pause, especially where basic training and the CHERUB campus are concerned.

Once James departs on his first mission, the page-turning power wanes a little, but with so much momentum behind it, The Recruit is virtually unstoppable. What Muchamore gives us in the final few chapters is a somewhat sobering reminder of his novel's realism. For all its action-packed charisma, this miniature portrait of intelligence work is coloured with a complexity and depth that complete the book very nicely.

The hype is fully justified; Robert Muchamore's first CHERUB novel will grab you, thrill you and leave you eager for more. It's a good thing the series shows no signs of running out any time soon.