At the outset of this first book in Anthony Horowitz's latest series (Scholastic, 2005), 14-year-old Matt is arrested at the scene of an electronics warehouse break-in. Soon, he's remanded to the home of a crone in a country village. She's ornery, but the village is out and out creepy: he can't find a road that goes anywhere but in a circle and it seems everyone to whom he turns for help winds up dead. Horowitz's Alex Rider books presented the boy against the system of national espionage. Matt's situation is even worse-his opponents are witches. Simon Prebble's pacing as Matt struggles from quicksand, is chased by dinosaurs through the Natural History Museum, and finds himself about to be sacrificed by the coven in a secluded wood remains agonizingly steady, wringing every drop of horror from the author's carefully drawn plot in this fantasy set in modern times.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.