The Fall (Robert Muchamore novel)

The Fall
First edition cover
Author(s)	Robert Muchamore
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	CHERUB
Genre(s)	Children's, Thriller, Spy novel
Publisher	Hodder and Stoughton
Publication date	15 March 2007
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	324 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0340-91170-0 (first edition, paperback)
OCLC Number	76361189
Preceded by	Man vs Beast
Followed by	Mad Dogs

The Fall (2007) is the seventh novel in the CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore. In this novel CHERUB agent James Adams is trapped in Russia, while his sister Lauren faces danger from human traffickers.

Plot

An MI5 operation goes disastrously wrong when two agents working with James Adams murder their prime suspect instead of interrogating him (as was the plan), and he is trapped within Aero City, Russia, without any way of contacting CHERUB. Eventually, he resorts to mugging a passer-by for a mobile phone, but before he can make the call a gang of Russians beat him up and pass him on for a bounty. Instead, he ends up given to a CIA agent who had been working undercover for several months. He provides James with a satellite phone, and he is able to call Ewart and get pulled out. When on the escape plane, though, he is knocked out by expanding gas in his sinuses.

Half a week later, James wakes up in hospital near CHERUB campus, to the relief of sister Lauren and girlfriend Kerry, who have been at his bedside since he arrived.

While the investigation into the Russia mission's failure is in progress, James is suspended from missions. Lauren, meanwhile, is sent on a solo anti-human trafficking mission in Brighton She connects well with her target, Russian-born Anna but due of a miscalculation in timing is taken from Brighton to a holding house. She escapes by stabbing a man who was attempting to abuse her in the groin, then frees the other girls there as an armed response unit arrives.

On campus, James has been dragged into helping the training instructors - he and his friend Bruce are putting one of the redshirts through a course similar to the swimming course James went through before training - this time, they have to help the redshirt overcome a fear of heights. Upon succeeding, the head instructor, Pike, advises James to give Ewart's investigation a look-over, since he had previously screwed Pike over as an agent. Kerry refuses to help James, so he goes to Ewart's office in the mission prep building solo, using Pike's security card. He finds out that he had been put in the clear over a week before, when Ewart had told him two days before that it could still go either way. He begins to root through the full investigation with the help of fellow agent Dana Smith, who caught him in Ewart's office. Lauren arrives from her mission to find both of them with their t-shirts off and Dana's bra in James' hand snogging - she threatens to tell Kerry about several other incidents of James cheating unless he comes clean the next day.

James and Dana tail Ewart the next day using a pool car - they end up leaving before many others are awake, so James is unable to talk to Kerry. Ewart visits several figures in the investigation, but eventually is caught out and has a gun pulled on him. The two cherubs intervene and save Ewart's life. Ewart reveals that he knew James was proved innocent by CCTV footage, but MI5 did not want their own agents looking bad, so had been attempting to get James to trip over his own account of the events by interviewing him over and over. Chairwoman Zara Asker arrives and, though disapproving of their motives, awards James and Dana the black T-shirt for their decisive action, and the two are taken back to campus - where a rumour has quickly circulated that they had actually eloped. A confrontation with an unimpressed Kerry escalates to a full-scale food fight in the cafeteria, during which James realises that this had begun because of him.

Shortly afterwards, a report by the ethics committee decides that mission controllers are always necessary overseas, and that a cherub's emotional safety should be paramount in the event of any investigations.

External links

• Official CHERUB site page for book