Russian Roulette (book)

Russian Roulette

First edition hardback cover
Author	Anthony Horowitz
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Alex Rider series
Genre	Adventure, Spy novel
Publisher	The Penguin Group
Publication date	12 September 2013 (UK)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	405
ISBN
Preceded by	Scorpia Rising

Russian Roulette is the tenth novel in the Alex Rider series written by British author Anthony Horowitz. It was first published in 2013. The novel serves as a prequel to the Alex Rider series but mainly focuses on the childhood of the assassin who appears in many of the books, Yassen Gregorovich.

Shortly after the Science Museum scene in Stormbreaker, Yassen Gregorovich, who was staying at a hotel named "The Traveller", receives an order to kill Alex Rider. The connection the two of them share prompts Yassen to recall his past, by inserting a memory stick which contains his diary in digital format into his Apple Mac laptop.

Yassen reveals that he was named "Yasha" originally and that it evolved into "Yassen" quite accidentally. He was born in a small Russian village named Estrov, in quite a rural area. It did not have a railway station and it consisted only of a few houses and a church. Yassen's parents worked at a factory nearby, which apparently produced fertilisers (but in fact also secretly developed chemical weapons for the Russian government). Yassen attended a school in a nearby town, Rosna, and befriended a boy named Leo Tretyakov. Yassen and Leo had a great bond of friendship between them and they had smoked cigarettes together, despite being 14 at the time. A passion for helicopters is also revealed in Yassen's character and he has read a lot of magazines regarding helicopters and seems to have had an extensive knowledge concerning them, despite his rural background. It is mentioned on many occasions how Yassen used to look enviously at planes that would fly over his village. However, Yassen had a far-reaching bond with his place of birth, which is revealed in the story.

14-year-old Yassen is forced to flee his home after an accident at the factory contaminates the whole village with a deadly strain of anthrax, which had been genetically modified to spread much more faster than it would in normal conditions. No one in the village had been aware of the catastrophe, though they could sense that something was amiss. Yassen, however, was made aware of the situation by his parents, who had immediately broken out of the facility once the accident took place, with the intention of saving Yassen, disobeying direct orders and protocol in the process. (The factory workers had been ordered not to leave the premises, in order to quarantine those who were already contaminated.) It had been a pretty useless precaution for the bacterium had already been released into the atmosphere. In the process of breaking out of the factory Yassen's father had been shot and had suffered severe injuries. A bewildered Yassen is brought up to speed and his parents vaguely reveal that they had not been working in the factory out of their own free will. They also openly confess that they had been ashamed of being involved in the whole affair. They advise Yassen to immediately flee from the village and go to Moscow and seek Misha Dementyev, who had been a friend of Yassen's father. The parents recommend a route through the forest, adjoining Estrov and through Kirsk. Though the entire village is contaminated, Yassen survives, having been given the only sample of antidote which had been devised by Yassen's father, who had been one of the scientists who were responsible for the anthrax in the first place. The Russian authorities proceed to send attack helicopters to destroy the village, in order to contain the outbreak and cover up the development of the chemical weaponry. Yassen escapes with his best friend Leo, but they are pursued by a band of soldiers who had been ordered hunt down all the survivors of the Estrov disaster, so as to contain the anthrax from spreading. After evading the soldiers, Leo later dies from the effects of the outbreak.