Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl II is the twelve-year-old criminal mastermind at the center of Eoin Colfer’s *Artemis Fowl*, first published in 2001. He belongs to a wealthy Irish family, but its fortunes are faltering: his father has disappeared after a shipping venture went wrong, and his mother, Angeline, has withdrawn into her bedroom. Artemis responds not by waiting for help, but by investigating reports of fairies. With his bodyguard, Domovoi Butler, he obtains a fairy’s Book, translates its rules and devises a plan to capture a fairy for ransom.

His prisoner is Holly Short, an officer in the fairy police force known as LEPrecon. Artemis traps her at Fowl Manor and demands a tonne of gold. The standoff introduces him to the technologically advanced fairy world beneath the human one, as well as to Commander Julius Root, the centaur technician Foaly and the dwarf thief Mulch Diggums. Artemis outwits much of the rescue operation, but the encounter is not a simple victory. He returns half the gold in exchange for Holly healing his mother.

Across eight main novels, published through 2012, Artemis’s relationship with the fairies changes. In *The Arctic Incident*, he seeks their help in rescuing his father from kidnappers in Russia while Holly and her colleagues confront a goblin rebellion backed by the inventor Opal Koboi. In *The Eternity Code*, Artemis builds a powerful device called the C Cube, only to have it stolen by American businessman Jon Spiro. The fairies later erase Artemis’s knowledge of them, a measure that does not end their association.

Opal returns in *The Opal Deception*, framing Holly for Julius Root’s death. *The Lost Colony* takes Artemis and Holly into a conflict involving demons and the lost island of Hybras. In *The Time Paradox*, Artemis travels into his own past to save Angeline from a deadly illness, bringing him face to face with the younger, less compassionate version of himself. *The Atlantis Complex* shows the strain of his experiences through an obsessive-compulsive condition and an alternate persona named Orion.

By *The Last Guardian*, Artemis is willing to sacrifice his life to stop Opal’s final attack on Fowl Manor. That choice marks the distance he has travelled from the boy who treated Holly as a bargaining chip. Colfer later returned to the family in *The Fowl Twins*, a series centered on Artemis’s younger brothers, Myles and Beckett.