The Pharaoh Key (Gideon Crew Series #5)

by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

Overview

Don't miss the this exciting, New York Times bestselling adventure from Preston & Child, in which the secrets of a mysterious ancient tablet may point the way to untold treasure—or unspeakable danger.



"I just want to be crystal clear about this: if it has value, we're gonna steal it. Are you with me?"


Effective Engineering Solutions has been inexplicably shut down and the head of the company, Eli Glinn, has all but vanished. Fresh off a diagnosis that gives him only months to live, Gideon Crew is contacted by one of his coworkers at EES, Manuel Garza, who tells him the two have mere hours to collect their belongings before the office closes forever. After years of dedicated service and several high-risk missions, theirs seems like the most ignoble of terminations-until Gideon and Garza happen upon an incredible discovery.


After centuries of silence, a code-breaking machine at EES has cracked the long-awaited translation of a centuries-old stone tablet, the Phaistos Disc, that dates back to an otherwise completely unknown, ancient civilization. The mysteries of the message itself hint at incredible treasures, and perhaps even a world-altering secret. No one remains at EES to take on this most remarkable mission but Gideon and Garza. The two agree to solve the mystery of the disc's message and split the spoils: the perfect parting gift their employer doesn't know he has given.


What lies at the end of the trail may save Gideon's life-or bring it to a sudden, shocking close. As Gideon and Garza soon discover, some missions are more dangerous than others. But as Gideon has proved again and again, there's no such thing as too great a risk when you're living on borrowed time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455525805
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Series:	Gideon Crew Series , #5
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	41,443
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

The thrillers of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child "stand head and shoulders above their rivals" (Publishers Weekly). Preston and Child's Relic and The Cabinet of Curiosities were chosen by readers in a National Public Radio poll as being among the one hundred greatest thrillers ever written, and Relic was made into a number-one box office hit movie. They are coauthors of the famed Pendergast series and their recent novels include Fever Dream, Cold Vengeance, Two Graves, and Gideon's Corpse. In addition to his novels, Preston writes about archaeology for the New Yorker and Smithsonian magazines. Lincoln Child is a former book editor who has published five novels of his own, including the huge bestseller Deep Storm.
Readers can sign up for The Pendergast File, a monthly "strangely entertaining note" from the authors, at their website, www.PrestonChild.com. The authors welcome visitors to their alarmingly active Facebook page, where they post regularly.

Introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci and stories by Lee Child, Michael Connelly, John Sandford, Lisa Gardner, Dennis Lehane, Steve Berry, Jeffery Deaver, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, James Rollins, Joseph Finder, Steve Martini, Heather Graham, Ian Rankin, Linda Fairstein, M.J. Rose, R.L. Stine, Raymond Khoury, Linwood Barclay, John Lescroart, T. Jefferson Parker, F. Paul Wilson, and Peter James.

David W. Collins, audiobook narrator, began building his acting and voice-over career in San Francisco, performing in numerous radio spots, video games, national television commercials, and phone systems. Besides being an actor, he is also an award-winning sound designer, voice director, and composer in the video-game industry, having received accolades for his work with the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Thrillville, and Monkey Island franchises.

Place of Birth:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Pomona College, 1978

Website:

http://www.prestonchild.com

Editorial Reviews

01/01/2018
Terminally ill Gideon Crew is shocked when a former employer disappears. Then he learns that the final project of her now shuttered lab involved translating an ancient stone tablet whose secrets could save Gideon's life—or end it with a bang.

Library Journal

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)

Publishers Weekly

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

From the Publisher

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

MAY 2018 - AudioFile

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews