Scorpia

Scorpia is an adventure novel by Anthony Horowitz, published in 2004 and the fifth book in the Alex Rider series. It follows directly from Eagle Strike, and its subject is the organisation that had been left in the background of the earlier novels.

Alex is still working out what he has learned about his father, and he travels to Italy to find Scorpia, the group responsible. He infiltrates the world of Claudia Rothman and the people around her and is offered training and a place among them, which is the book's central danger: the offer comes from people who know exactly what he wants, and the novel shows how the arrangement works before it is refused.

Horowitz moves the series between glamorous European locations and the practical business of an operation, and this book's ending is one of the most discussed in the sequence. It is the volume in which Alex's family history becomes the plot rather than the motive, and it leaves the series in a very different place.