MAY 2018 - AudioFile
Indiana Jones fans, fasten your seat belts—or more appropriately, your camel saddles—and hang on for a nonstop ride. This audiobook is the fifth entry in the Gideon Crew series. Having had his fatal diagnosis confirmed, Gideon chooses to spend the remaining months of his life with his colleague, Manuel Garza, and an enigmatic geoarchaeologist, Imogen. They’re tracking down a mysterious ancient fortune in a remote area of the Egyptian dessert. Narrator David W. Collins returns to portray Gideon, who for a very smart and successful adventurer sounds a bit whiny and peevish. (Maybe dying will do that to you.) He is less successful with Imogen’s inconsistent British accent. Most importantly, he successfully differentiates Gideon from the cantankerous Garza. E.Q. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
04/30/2018
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)
From the Publisher
PRAISE FOR THE GIDEON CREW SERIES:
"Preston & Child take all of the various elements from classic horror and sci-fi films and novels and spin them together to write what begins as an action adventure, but soon delves into paranoid terror ... scary good fun."—Associated Press, on BEYOND THE ICE LIMIT
"Preston and Child have been in the business of keeping secrets for years now and simply no one's better at knowing just how long to keep them... wildly entertaining and lightening paced... impossible to put down."
—Providence Sunday Journal, on THE LOST ISLAND
The eponymous Gideon Crew would be equally comfortable smack in a Ludlum tempest or striding onto the set of the Ocean's Eleven franchise. Preston and Child have crafted an electrifying, riveting thriller on which I could continue to heap praise, but instead I will just offer this: Read the book! And we can all look forward to the next appearance of Mr. Gideon Crew in the not-so-distant future."—David Baldacci, on Gideon's Sword
"One wild, series-ending adventure....
cleverly plotted...This is a great cap on the series."
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
"Entertaining...Fans of the Indiana Jones movies
will find plenty to like."
—Publishers Weekly
"Look up adventure in the dictionary and you're likely to find a picture of Doug Preston and Lincoln Child for reasons that are all on display in 'The Pharaoh Key'....This is lightning-paced, action-thriller writing of the highest order, a throwback to the best of Alistair MacLean and reminiscent of James Rollins and Brad Meltzer at their best."—Providence Sunday Journal
"[THE PHARAOH KEY] invokes classic adventure novels from the early 20th century. Mystery after mystery builds into a finale that even savvy readers won't see coming. If this truly is the last Gideon Crew novel, the authors have ended his escapades in grand style; fans will rejoice and newcomers will appreciate the sheer scope of everything."—The Associated Press
"As always with this team, Preston & Child have done their homework and taken a very interesting relic in order to produce, once again, a story that will have readers thrilled and excited and begging (still) for more of their creations to come as fast as possible."
—
Amy Lignor, Suspense Magazine
MAY 2018 - AudioFile
Indiana Jones fans, fasten your seat belts—or more appropriately, your camel saddles—and hang on for a nonstop ride. This audiobook is the fifth entry in the Gideon Crew series. Having had his fatal diagnosis confirmed, Gideon chooses to spend the remaining months of his life with his colleague, Manuel Garza, and an enigmatic geoarchaeologist, Imogen. They’re tracking down a mysterious ancient fortune in a remote area of the Egyptian dessert. Narrator David W. Collins returns to portray Gideon, who for a very smart and successful adventurer sounds a bit whiny and peevish. (Maybe dying will do that to you.) He is less successful with Imogen’s inconsistent British accent. Most importantly, he successfully differentiates Gideon from the cantankerous Garza. E.Q. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-05-15
Doomed by a fatal illness, Gideon Crew embarks on one wild, series-ending adventure (Beyond the Ice Limit, 2016, etc.).Crew has AVM, a brain malformation that will kill him in about two months, although he'll feel fine until his sudden death. He and his engineer colleague Manuel Garza lose their jobs with no warning when their employer, Effective Engineering Solutions, suddenly stops paying them and shuts down without a word of explanation. While they're cleaning out their desks, they discover that a computer in the office has just finished a calculation that it's been working on for 43,000 hours—almost five years. Garza sticks a USB drive in the computer and downloads the information, which is about a secret project to decipher the ancient Phaistos Disk. Garza proposes that they find whatever treasure it may lead to and sell it "for the most dough we possibly can," no matter what it turns out to be, even if it's a "fucking centerfold of the Mona Lisa." So they trek to the desolate Hala'ib Triangle in southeastern Egypt, a journey involving one blasted thing after another. They ride an ancient ferry that sinks on the Red Sea, drowning hundreds. A woman outbids Crew and Garza when they try to rent camels, their guide cheats them, and they nearly die of thirst in the desert, where they try to survive a haboob—"the worst kind of dust storm"—and find a "mist oasis." The pace never slackens as they get closer to the GPS coordinates they're looking for, and they have an encounter that changes everything. Crew's legerdemain and Garza's nifty engineering skills get them out of serious jams but may not save them from the one-eyed leopard or the fearsome warrior who is determined to fight Garza to the death. Through all of this, Crew faces the ultimate clock, the one ticking inside his brain. This is a cleverly plotted yarn with some laugh-out-loud twists, the best ones involving Garza's bravery and ingenuity. There are numerous references to earlier books in the series, and fans might like to read Beyond the Ice Limit first. Still, this book stands alone just fine.When the end of a book with a dying hero makes the reader laugh, that's a neat trick. This is a great cap on the series.
