The Pharaoh Key: A Gideon Crew Novel

The entertaining fifth Gideon Crew novel from bestsellers Preston and Child (after 2016’s Beyond the Ice Limit) takes professional thief Gideon and his courageous sidekick, Manuel Garza, from New York City—where their employer, Effective Engineering Solutions, has suddenly ceased operations—to Egypt in search of a treasure that was the object of EES’s last, unfinished case. Before their departure, Gideon and Manuel make a final visit to EES’s Manhattan office, where they surreptitiously download a picture of the ancient Phaistos Disk; they soon succeed in breaking the code inscribed on the disk and revealing the treasure’s exact location in the Hala’ib Triangle. In the course of their quest, Gideon and Garza escape from a sinking ship on the Red Sea, join forces with an attractive British geologist named Imogen Blackburn, and discover a lost civilization in a remote valley. The authors keep the tone light and the reader guessing right up to the open ending, which leaves some major plot points unresolved. Fans of the Indiana Jones movies will find plenty to like. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (June)