Lockdown is the ferocious new title in Alexander Gordon Smith's new series, Escape from Furnace. For kids who like Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series, or Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak, this book will strike exactly the right balance of adventure and terror.
The trouble started when Alex got caught. Sure, he'd been stealing cars and breaking into houses since he was a kid, but he'd never been busted by the cops...until one night, the B&E seems just too easy. Sure enough, there's someone waiting inside...and they're not the police. Not even close.
Alex runs, but there's no escape. Soon he's in jail for a crime he didn't commit: murder one. And not just any jail, but the infamous Furnace Penitentiary, a state of the art prison for young offenders. Years ago, England decided to deal with the gang problems by building the most sophistocated prison ever. It sinks down miles underground, built into a deep crevice in the rock. No one has ever escaped: anyone who tries is executed with extreme prejudice. Alex can feel hope falling away from him with every metre the elevator drops, but he hasn't got a clue what's really going on in the guts of Furnace's tunnels.
Death is the least of Alex's worries when he reaches the bottom of the pit, for the boring mundanity of prison jobs and tasteless slop for meals is punctuated by the terror of being hauled away by the nightmarish prison guards, and turned into something horrible. Escape is the only option for Alex, because he knows that even in death there's no way out of Furnace.
Adventure/Thriller
Grades 8-12
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