Teenage mountain climber Peak Marcello (Peak, 2008) is back, and this time he is off to the rugged, remote Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan. Peak, reluctant to find himself in the spotlight again after nearly becoming the youngest climber to summit Everest, has nonetheless agreed to join young climbers from all over the world to make a "Peace Climb," bankrolled by one of the world's richest men, for a documentary that is to air Christmas Day. Surprises await Peak as soon as the helicopter touches down at base camp: an inexperienced and autocratic director; a beautiful French climber; and Zopa, an otherworldly Tibetan Sherpa who guided Peak on Everest. Peak will need all the help he can get when the adventure abruptly turns violent is lucky Zopa is there, as well as his multilingual mother. Peak is developing intellectual and emotional skills to match his formidable physical ones; his powers of observation here are exercised almost as much as his quadriceps.

Gr 6-10 Six months after a perilous attempt to summit Mount Everest in Peak (HMH, 2007), 15-year-old Peak Marcello and a film crew are off to climb the Pamir mountains of Afghanistan. Dubbed the Peace Climb, in which 200 international teens are climbing the world's various mountains simultaneously, the event offers Peak an opportunity to exercise his Spiderman-like skills on something other than the tall buildings in his native New York. Joined by his mother, Teri, an experienced climber who was known as The Fly in her day, and by Zopa, a respected Sherpa friend from Everest, Peak is more focused on the climb than on Afghanistan's outlaw factions, which pose more than a slight travel risk. When kidnappers kill the documentary director and two guides and take Teri, Zopa, and others in the middle of the night, Peak and ex-Marine climber Ethan set out to rescue them. A budding romantic interest in one of the teen hostages, French climber Josette, is one more reason Peak runs into the face of danger with no weapon, no means of communication, and temperature extremes that ensure an untimely death. All the while being tracked by a shen (snow leopard), the unlikely heroes pool their military and outdoor survival knowledge for a nail-biting rescue attempt that will have middle school and older reluctant readers turning pages. VERDICT Extreme sports meets ruthless killers in a survival-of-the-fittest chase. Vicki Reutter, State University of New York at Cortland