Anthony Horowitz - Evil Star

A belting supernatural horror story. Not a read for the squeamish!

The Funday Times

The Horowitz formula is up to strength.

The Daily Telegraph

Gripping, full of suspense and as twisty as an Alpine pass. Matt Freemans adventures eclipse even those of the formidable Alex Rider.

The Scotsman

Horowitz ratchets things up a notch A master of edge-of-your-seat writing.

Booklist, American Library Association

A supernatural adventure of the most chilling kind The tension explodes into the sort of chase scenes that makes this author a favourite.

The Times

Go. Visit. Have an exhilarating read.

Kirkus Reviews

Horowitzs story glides effortlessly onwards, a delight to read, overshot with genuine creepiness and splashes of horror.

The New Zealand Herald on Sunday

If the other four are as good as this one, Horowitz fans are in for a treat

The Childrens Buyers Guide

Scorpia may be defeated, but the
Old Ones are definitely back!

THE POWER OF FIVE

Book Four

The next bestseller from
Anthony Horowitz

www.powerof5.co.uk

Alex Rider youre never too young to die

Horowitz is pure class, stylish but action-packed being James Bond in miniature is way cooler than being a wizard. Daily Mirror

Explosive, thrilling, action-packed meet Alex Rider. Guardian

The perfect hero genuine 21st century stuff. Daily Telegraph

www.alexrider.com

There was something wrong about the house in Eastfield Terrace. Something unpleasant.

All the houses in the street were more or less identical: redbrick, Victorian, with two bedrooms on the first floor and a bay window on either the left or the right of the front door. Some had satellite dishes. Some had window boxes filled with brightly coloured flowers. But looking down from the top of the hill at the terrace curving round St Patricks church on its way to the Esso garage and All-Nite store, one house stood out immediately. Number twenty-seven no longer belonged there. It was as if it had caught some sort of disease and needed to be taken away.

The front garden was full of junk, and as usual the wheelie bin beside the gate was overflowing, surrounded by black garbage bags that the owners had been unable to stuff inside. This wasnt uncommon in Eastfield Terrace. Nor was it particularly strange that the curtains were permanently drawn across the front windows and, as far as anyone could tell, the lights were never turned on. But the house smelled. For weeks now there had been a rotten, sewagey smell that had seemed at first to be coming from a blocked pipe but that had rapidly got worse until people had begun to cross the street to avoid it. And whatever was causing it seemed to be affecting the entire place. The grass on the front lawn was beginning to die. The flowers had wilted and then been choked up by weeds. The colour seemed to be draining out of the very bricks.

The neighbours had tried to complain. They had knocked on the front door, but nobody had come. They had telephoned, but nobody had answered. Finally, they had called the borough council at the Ipswich Civic Centre but of course it would be weeks before any action was taken. The house wasnt empty. That much they knew. They had occasionally seen the owner, Gwenda Davis, pacing back and forth behind the net curtains. Once more than a week ago she had been seen scurrying home from the shops. And there was one other piece of evidence that there was still life at number twenty-seven: every evening the television was turned on.

Gwenda Davis was well known in the street.

She had lived there for much of her adult life, first on her own and then with her partner, Brian Conran, who worked occasionally as a milkman. But what had really set the neighbours talking was the time, six years ago, when she had inexplicably adopted an eight-year-old boy and brought him home to live with her. Everyone agreed that she and Brian were not exactly the ideal parents. He drank. The two of them argued. And according to local gossip, they hardly knew the boy, whose own parents had died in a car accident.