The Pharaoh Key by Douglas PrestonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Two years after Beyond the Ice Limit, here we are again with Gideon Crew, except he's no longer got the backing of Eli Glinn. That ol' Musk knockoff (dating back to before Elon Musk was even a thing) has decided to screw over all his people, Gideon included, by shutting down his company. Luckily, though, Gideon and his old friend Manuel Garza get to go off on one last mission together, based on the findings of one of Glinn's side projects - a possible decryption of the mysterious Phaistos disk.
Because Glinn is no longer bankrolling the adventure, it's decidedly a more minimalist one than previous Gideon Crew stories. Just Gideon and Garza, mostly, as they travel to Egypt and deal with a sinking ferry, corrupt cops, haboobs, thieving expedition guides, the mysterious Imogen, and of course a small Coptic village, isolated from the outside world for so long that they continue to keep to pre-Islamic customs.
It's not the best Preston and Child book of all, but for what it's worth, it's a fairly nice 300-page time sink. Even if it relies a little too much on fakeout "deaths," and ultimately leads up to a string of partial reveals but never reveals all the answers to all the mysteries, because the Crew books are so infamous for lead-on kind of endings that really sting given the longer gap between them than for novels with Agent Pendergast. But at least this one had a more linear, easy to follow plot than Beyond the Ice Limit, and felt like a smaller-scale James Rollins story with the historical background behind the treasure that Gideon, Garza, and Imogen do eventually find.
I just hope P&C intend to follow up on this book sooner rather than later.
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