The seventh Alex Rider novel, published in 2007.
Tropes include:
- All There in the Manual: Ash's name was never revealed, (ASH are his initials); after much requests, Horowitz included it in a bonus chapter for the paperback release.
- And I Must Scream: Major Yu's plan to dispose of Alex: Slowly have his organs removed and sold on the black market, starting with his corneas and eventually reducing him to a husk on life support.
- Bait the Dog: Ash does this to Alex by promising to protect him, since Alex is his godson, and tell him about John Rider, while allowing for Master Yu to nearly kill Alex several times and disarming him of a distress signal. He has the gall to be regretful when Master Yu forces him to reveal the ruse to Alex when Ash is fatally shot.
- Cacophony Cover Up: Alex uses a peal of thunder to cover up the explosion he uses to blow a float off a seaplane. Later, he uses another peal of thunder to mask the sound of him smashing the plane's window.
- Faux Affably Evil: As Alex notes, the kindness of the staff at the hospital where Yu plans to kill him by harvesting his organs is what makes them so damn creepy.
- Feed the Mole: It's implied this was ASIS' true aim in using Alex with Ash.
- Foreshadowing: Smithers mentions offhand that he had once met Cloudy Webber in disguise at a party, and the pair of them chatted for half an hour before they recognized each other. One wonders how someone who makes her living on disguises wouldn't recognize Smithers right away just from his obesity. Scorpia Rising reveals that his fat was another gadget; he's actually a lean Irishman.
- Immediate Sequel: Snakehead begins immediately after Ark Angel.
- Karmic Death: If it wasn't for the shockwave from the bomb he was gonna use, Major Winston Yu would've gotten away.
- Kill It with Fire: Alex steals gasoline from the sea-plane and Dr. Tanner's own cigarette lighter to burn down the organ harvesting camp as he escapes.
- Land Mine Goes "Click!": Alex steps on a land mine in an Australian SAS training area and hears it go click. A nearby soldier tells him that it is now armed and will go off if he moves his weight in any way. However, the mine also has a time delay fuse and will explode in 15 minutes even if he doesn't move. The soldier goes to get help. When he doesn't return, Alex eventually escapes by throwing himself down the slope of the hill away from the mine. The whole thing was a Secret Test of Character to see how Alex handled himself in stressful situations, and he was never in any real danger.
- MacGyvering: When Alex is being held in the titular organisation's organ-harvesting facility, he uses the seaplane that brings patients there (it stays there overnight, and Alex realises that the facility's security was only checked whilst the plane was away) to this end — he uses an explosive to tear one of the floats off and cannibalises it into a makeshift kayak. For good measure, he drains some petrol from the seaplane's tank and uses it to set fire to the hospital camp so they're too busy to go after him.
- Manipulative Bastard: Ethan Brooke, the head of ASIS. When Alex coincidentally lands off the Australian coast after Ark Angel, he immediately launches a gambit to see how Alex does in the field, much to the horror of his subordinates, and manipulates Alex into entering a dangerous mission with Alex's godfather. Alex theorizes at the end that Brooke strongly suspected that Ash was The Mole for Scorpia and the snakeheads, and paired him with Alex in a bid to flush him out.
- Organ Theft: A justification for the villain keeping Alex alive yet again. He has Alex taken to a hidden facility where his various organs will be removed one-at-a-time (finishing with the heart) and sold to wealthy customers, allowing him to recover what Alex has cost him. Alex doesn't stick around.
- Refuge in Audacity: When Alex is trapped on the cargo ship the Liberian Star, Major Yu orders the entire ship's crew to begin searching for him. To avoid detection, Alex decides to hide in Yu's quarters, specifically under his bed, as Yu's quarters are the one place the crew aren't allowed to enter. It's even lampshaded when Alex realises how incredibly stupid he'll look if Yu finds him.
- Right Under Their Noses: When Major Yu finds out about Alex's escape on the Liberian Star, he orders everyone on the ship to search for him. A day later, they've made no progress. Yu isn't surprised that Alex managed to evade them...but he still fails to draw this conclusion, despite the fact that the only place nobody has searched is his own living quarters.Narration: The man who sat on the executive board of Scorpia and who headed the most powerful snakehead in Southeast Asia would have been horrified to learn that Alex was hiding in perhaps the most obvious place in the world. Under his own bed.
- Rule of Three: Alex is given three exploding coins by Smithers. As he prepares to use the last one, he notes that if everything goes to plan all three will have saved his life.
- Significant Anagram: Mrs. Jones points out in the final chapter that Unwin Toys is a rearrangement of Winston Yu. The way she asks "Did you notice that it was an anagram?" seems directed at the readers as well as Alex.
- Villain's Dying Grace: It is very implicit, possibly unintentional, and doesn't earn him any sympathy from the good guys in the wake of everything else revealed before he dies. But when Ash regains consciousness long enough to reveal that he had been a mole for Scorpia all along—and more than that, that he had been the one to kill Alex's parents—Major Yu, who held Alex at gunpoint, chose to put off shooting Alex until the exposition was finished, which bought just enough time for Alex's reinforcements to save him. He was beyond Alex's forgiveness, but his last actions still saved Alex's life.
- When the Clock Strikes Twelve: The planetary alignment Major Yu needs to make his fantastic scheme work happens to be occurring exactly at midnight. Therefore Alex has until midnight to stop him.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Major Yu lampshades this while holding Alex at gunpoint before sending him off to the organ-harvesting camp.Major Yu: The easiest and perhaps the most sensible thing would be to shoot you now. In half an hour, you would be at the bottom of the ocean, and neither Ethan Brooke nor Mrs. Jones would ever know what happened to you. But I’m not going to do that.
- You Have No Chance to Survive: When Alex arrives at the Snakehead's center for organ harvesting, Dr. Tanner gives a lengthy speech in this vein: they have enough defenses in place to prevent escape, and even if he got out, the jungle is a death trap and they have no boats for the river. It gives Alex all the information he needs to break out two days later, largely because Tanner fails to account for the fact that the seaplane used to bring patients to the facility is going to be there on the night Alex makes his escape.
