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When Artemis Fowl arrived in 2001, it was saddled with the "new Harry Potter" label and has spent the two decades since either suffering from or quietly shrugging off the comparison. Read on its own terms, Eoin Colfer's debut is something considerably stranger: a middle-grade heist thriller about a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind who kidnaps a fairy for ransom. Colfer himself pitched the book as "Die Hard with fairies," and that framing is closer to the truth than any Hogwarts comparison could ever be.

The setup is efficient. Artemis Fowl, heir to an Irish crime dynasty, has tracked down the fairy Book, translated its secrets, and used them to trap Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon unit. What follows is a siege at Fowl Manor in which Artemis, aided by his bodyguard Butler, tries to outwit an increasingly agitated fairy recon squad equipped with mechanical wings, time-stop technology and a weapons-grade centaur tech officer called Foaly. The real pleasure of the book is watching the stakes escalate as each side assumes it has the upper hand, then discovers it does not.

Colfer's greatest asset is his cast. Butler is a wonderfully loyal, understated man-mountain; Holly is resourceful and prickly without tipping into the standard feisty-action-girl shorthand; Commander Root bellows his way through every scene he occupies; and the scene-stealing kleptomaniac dwarf Mulch Diggums earns every page he appears on. Artemis himself is the more difficult proposition. He is cold, calculating and faintly unpleasant, and Colfer does not soften him to make the reader's life any easier. Some will find this thrilling, a genuinely amoral child antagonist in a genre that usually hedges its bets. Others will find it harder to spend a whole book with him, particularly when his justifications (a missing father, an unwell mother) feel more like mitigation than motivation.

The prose is brisk and funny, splicing straight third-person narration with faux case-file entries and footnotes that give the fairy world texture. The structural tic of replaying scenes from a different point of view can feel laboured, and the plot occasionally leans on fairy-ex-machina moments where a new gadget or spell conveniently appears to solve a problem. There is also a streak of heavy-handed environmentalism directed at the "Mud People" that sits awkwardly against the book's otherwise light tone, and the central cast, for all its charm, is closer to a collection of sharply defined traits than fully rounded characters.

None of this quite dents the experience. Artemis Fowl is paced like a thriller, has genuine wit in its dialogue, and its fairy world, part folklore and part GPS-and-gunmetal techno-thriller, still feels fresher than most of what followed in its wake. The characterisation is broad rather than deep, and the morality is deliberately murky, but the book earns its continued shelf-life. It reads as a fast, funny, slightly mean-spirited little heist novel that respects its young audience enough to trust them with an antihero, and that confidence is most of the reason it still works.