Never Say Die recap

A year after Jack Starbright was killed in front of him in the Egyptian desert, Alex Rider is living in San Francisco with Sabina Pleasure and her parents, grieving and going through the motions of an ordinary school life. Then something reaches him that suggests Jack did not die that day. Nobody official believes it, and Alex goes after it himself, which takes him out of America and back into the criminal world he had promised himself he was finished with. The trail leads to the people who staged her death and have kept her since, and it ends with Alex finding Jack alive and getting her out. The loss the previous book built its ending on is undone, and Alex has his guardian back.

Previously: Alex Rider was recruited by MI6 at fourteen after his uncle Ian's murder, and was used again and again by Alan Blunt and Mrs Jones: Herod Sayle's poisoned school computers, Dr Hugo Grief's clones at Point Blanc, General Alexei Sarov, Damian Cray, Nikolai Drevin's space station, a snakehead in Southeast Asia, a manufactured famine in Kenya. The assassin Yassen Gregorovich, dying, sent him to Scorpia in Venice, where he was recruited with a lie about his father before turning on the organisation; MI6 then admitted that John Rider had been their own officer inside Scorpia under the codename Hunter, and that Alex's parents died when a bomb brought down their plane. Scorpia's final operation was aimed at Alex personally. In Cairo it took him and his guardian, and its operative Razim had Jack Starbright killed in a rigged jeep in front of him, to measure his reaction. Alex stopped the plot and Scorpia was destroyed; Blunt was forced out and Mrs Jones took over. With no family left in London, Alex went to live with the Pleasures in San Francisco.

A year after Cairo, Alex is in San Francisco with Sabina and her parents, at an American school, apparently safe and not recovering. Then something reaches him that does not fit what he watched happen in the desert, and points to the possibility that Jack Starbright was never in the jeep at all. It is thin, nobody with any authority takes it seriously, and Alex acts on it anyway, which puts him back into the world he had left and against people who staged her death and have held her since. He finds where she is being kept and gets her out alive. The scheme her captors were running is broken with them. Jack is alive and back with Alex, and the loss the previous book ended on is undone.

Alex is proved right: Jack Starbright is alive. She was not in the jeep that was destroyed in front of him, and she has been held since by the criminals who let him believe otherwise. Alex finds where she is being kept and gets her out, and the two of them are reunited after a year in which he had accepted that she was dead. The people responsible for holding her are stopped along with the scheme they were running. What Alex is left with is the thing Scorpia Rising took from him and this book gives back: he has a family again, and the grief that had shaped everything since Cairo turns out to have been built on a lie he was told deliberately.