When Alex's dad drags him to Boswall and Sons, the local department store, he never expects to find himself thrown into a world of kidnap and spies. Written by Carnegie-nominated author Keith Gray, this fast-paced, exciting book shows that things aren't always as they seem...

* Diamond/Band 17 books offer more complex, underlying themes to give opportunities for children to understand causes and points of view.

* A mystery story

* A plan of the department store on pages 54 and 55 allows readers to recap the journey the boys make.

* Curriculum Links: Citizenship: Choices.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Diamond Series .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 56 pages in this book. This book was published 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Almost every Keith Gray novel has been shortlisted or won a major award. Creepers and Warehouse have been shortlisted for The Guardian Prize and The Runner won the Smarties Silver Medal in 2002. He lives in Edinburgh. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.