![]() Stellenbosch is an extremely proficient martial artist with a fighting style that emphasizes grappling moves before finishing off with a strike. Grief: "The weight-lifting championships." -Hugo Grief explains Stellenbosch's skills to Alex Rider Grief: "You should be aware, Alex, that Mrs Stellenbosch has worked with me now for twenty-six years and that when I met her she had been voted Ms South Africa five years in a row."ĭr. Stellenbosch dies when Wolf fires his machine gun at her and sends her crashing through a window into the snow.ĭr. Stellenbosch shoots Wolf three times, but luckily he isn't killed because he is wearing body-armour. She easily gains the upper hand due to her superior strength, but before she can kill Alex, Wolf bursts in to save him. Realising that she has been tricked, she fights Alex personally in the academy's dining room. An SAS Attack Squad raids Point Blanc that night, and Alex is confronted by a furious Mrs Stellenbosch. She physically torments Alex while Grief explains to him the Gemini Project, and when Alex is taken to hospital after trying to escape from Point Blanc, Stellenbosch is told by the doctors that Alex is dead (having had a serious accident whilst on skis). ![]() She knocks Alex out cold with a single punch, and both she and Dr Grief interrogate him in his study. Eventually, when Alex frees the boys who had been kidnapped by Grief, Stellenbosch is informed by one of Grief's guards of the intrusion. Grief, but she later catches him trying to get onto the top floor of Point Blanc, which he had already been told was strictly forbidden. The next day Stellenbosch takes Alex to meet Dr. Grief can one day be genetically altered to take his place in the 'Friend family'. She then has Alex photographed in a hidden laboratory so that a clone of Dr. Alex has dinner with Stellenbosch while she tells him about the academy, but she secretly has his glass of coke drugged and Alex falls unconscious in his room. Grief in South Africa and had known him for twenty-six years, and she now works as his personal assistant at the academy.Īlong the way, they stop at a Paris hotel owned by Point Bland stay the night. She was Miss South Africa in weightlifting for five years in a row (she possesses enough strength to bend a metal fire poker with her bare hands). ![]() She has wisps of bright ginger hair and a high, domed forehead. This matches the levels of excitement generated by Stormbreaker, but falls a little short when it comes to the panache of the dialogue.Mrs Stellenbosch is described as having huge muscles and a facial structure that 'wasn't quite human', with lips jutting far past her nose. Backgrounds are minimal, but their characterisation is impressive, and their action sequences well choreographed. There’s a certain similarity to their faces with the exception of the gruesomely illustrated Madame Stellenbosch, Grief’s henchwoman and former weightlifting champion. Sisters Kanako Damerum and Yuzuru Takasaki again supply manga style art tempered for those used to Western storytelling methods. Given that the next volume is Skeleton Key, the sharper readers will figure that out, but Horowitz delivers a smart coda just when everything appears done and dusted. Dr Grief has a plan, but will Alex be able to discover what it is before he too becomes one of the astonishingly well-behaved former miscreants? “The building was designed by a Frenchman who was certainly the world’s worst architect”, responds Dr Grief, “When the first owners moved in they had him shot.” Yes, we’re back in the territory of the lip-curling, exaggerated cartoon villain. It’s run by the suitably sinister Dr Hugo Grief and set high in the Swiss Alps, where the only way is down a sheer ski slope. The fathers of two boys at the exclusive Point Blanc school for troubled rich children have recently died in suspicious circumstances. His exalted status leads him back to MI6, where it just so happens there’s another job for which he’ll be ideal. It begins with Alex bored at school, then finding the ideal opportunity to help his community, which doesn’t follow the predicted path in a well-conceived stunt (on the part of Horowitz, if not Rider). Horowitz is well up to that task, and adapter Antony Johnston transfers him well from novel to graphic novel. Even at this stage it’s apparent the franchise is based on formula, with many of the staging points from Stormbreaker receiving another run through, so the success depends on the construction of the set pieces punctuating the formula. This adapts the second of Anthony Horowitz’s accomplished thrillers for teenagers starring fourteen year old secret agent Alex Rider.
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