Maximum Security (CHERUB)

Maximum Security is a novel by the British writer Robert Muchamore, published in 2005. It is the third book of the CHERUB series.

CHERUB is a British intelligence organisation that recruits children as agents, on the reasoning that nobody suspects them of anything, and its trainees live on a campus and take on missions before they turn seventeen. The boy they need in this story is the son of an arms dealer serving his sentence in a prison in Arizona, and the agency's solution is to place an agent inside the prison as an inmate so that he can make contact and work out what the father knows. Muchamore writes the series with the practical detail of the organisation's rules and training, and the moral problem of using children is part of the material rather than something the books avoid.

The series ran to twelve novels with the character James Adams at the centre, and it was written for teenagers who wanted the operational detail to be plausible rather than romantic.