A review by nightshade_novels
Russian Roulette by Anthony Horowitz

4.0

I have been looking forward to this book for ages, ever since the end of the Alex Rider series. As Yassan Gregorovich is one of my favourite characters in the series I was really looking forward to learning more about him. In that respect this book was really good; however its plot was not quite as exciting as any of the Alex Rider books.
It was interesting to learn what a disaster his life was right from the young age of fourteen. However,

Spoiler

despite all of that and all his training at Malagosto he still did not have it in him to become a killer. In the end it all came down to a second game of Russian Roulette; he chose to fill five of the six chambers of a gun with bullets and shoot at his head. He wanted to die, but accepted that if he did not then it was his destiny to become a killer. He shot the two men that had made his life a misery for three years and then returned to become the contract killer he had been trained to become. He used the Russian roulette to finally take control of his own life for the first time.
I liked the way that he got to know John Rider fairly well and looked up to him. This meant that the book also gave you more information about what Alex’s father was like. I loved the way that he would creep away to secretly meet his wife. It was John who showed him that he could not become a killer and him that Yassen then proved wrong.

Although not quite what I expected, this book was really interesting.