Nightrider

So, Alex Rider. The teenage super-spy who does impossibly nonsense like zooming down the side of an impossible skislope on an ironing board. But was that as absurd as tightrope walking - wholly untrained - across the roof of a burning buildng? Who could say.

Stormbreaker

Well, the series got off to a nicely xenophobic and generally minority-insulting start. A dwarven foreigner has come to England is mass producing computers filled with poison. Despite this being perfectly clear on the details of the computers, stupid headteachers are buying them up. Advice : don't buy poisoned computers, you morons! Alex Rider then changes himself to go undercover (see below) and infiltrate Sayle's factory, which also contains sharks. A quick lesson for Anthony Horowitz - sharks are not manufactured.

Nevertheless, Alex does some absurdity involving a giant inflatable colon or something and saves the day for the first - and sadly not the last - time.

Point Blanc

So, Alex Rider returns this time to go school. Oh, the excitement! Will he assassinate the dinner ladies when they feed him the wrong type of chip? Will he garrotte his maths teacher for being an incredible bore who is less interesting than a seagull? Alas no. In his latest absurdity he will battle some kind of living skeleton man accompanied by a giant hermaphrodite nazi, an unlikely pair who have nevertheless managed to clone humans.
Some people die, some people get shot, an SAS soldier no-one cares about dies, and then Alex Rider kills someone with a mechanized slow-sled thing. What does he say? "You've been sleighed."
Oh, and he also skis down a mountain on an ironing board as mentioned earlier, hits a freaking train at full speed but still survives. Horowitz is cranking up the realism index meter thing!!!!!

Skeleton Key

Ok, so which country or group shall we insult this time? I feel like a gander down "Better Dead Than Red" lane - let's have a bloated Russian who misses the good old days and may or may not look like Comrade Bloatface below.

Basically, the plot of this literary misfire involves a Russian general who wants to blow up his own country to restore it to its former glory or something while also poisoning an old school friend and drowning him under piles of voluptuous women.
He also seems to want Alex as his son, bringing in nice subtle undertones of paedophilia into the already spicy mix of crap. In addition, the Russian general has an assistant called Conrad, who in keeping with the holy-shit-this-guy-is-bizarre tradition of henchmen has a metal head. And body. Basically, he's a robot or something, and so eventually Alex uses a magnetic crane to dump him in a lake, which saves the day!!!

Eagle Strike

Ok, now this one really passed me by. Something happens involving a plane, a mercenary and six tubs of lube.

Scorpia

This time, just by TOTAL CHANCE, Alex happens upon the company of assassins who killed his father. Who would think of it? It's just like that time in Skeleton Key when he just happened to be in the perfect position to help MI6. How handy.
Anyway, this time after a brief tussle with a tiger and the latest freakish henchman - a man half black, half white - Alex joins the evil baddies who, for the second time in the Alex Rider series of pain, intend to kill English schoolchildren. What is your agenda Horowitz?
Anyway, Alex decides to have a balloon ride over London, kills people, scares a cat, blah blah, tramp gets crushed, hooray! The world is probably saved again, but then - disaster! Alex gets shot while stepping off the pavement, has a hallucination brought on by too much weed then collapses!

Arkangel

Alex Rider survives the bullet in the lamest way possible. He happened to be stepping off the curb at the second it hit him and so it missed his heart by an inch. How lucky! Even more convinient is the fact that he finds himself in the same hospital ward as another teenager who kidnappers are after. You'd think it was all planned like some awful plot device, wouldn't you?
Anyway, this kid is being kidnapped by his own dad for some reason in order to persuade the government that his dad isn't going ahead with THE MOST DUMBFUCKTACULAR plan ever.
This latest collection of words has a quite monumentally awful plot which nearly puts the last steaming pile of shit to shame. The plan of the evil father is to launch a monkey spaceship into orbit then divert its course and crash it into the Pentagon.
WHAT?!?!
Oh, and before this Alex tight-rope walks over the burning buildings as mentioned earlier for no real reason. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Alex goes into space, blinds someone using the "Bathe In Deadly Light" button on a spacestation and returns home to save the day having avoided destroying the Pentagon.

Please stop these books. Oh, and no more films. Ever.