The Iron Tomb

June 1, 2016
Thirteen-year-old Sam Force's boring summer in Cairo turns action-packed when his uncle disappears, leaving him to piece together the clues and rescue him before it is too late.Sam spends the school year at boarding school in Boston and dreads his summers, sifting through ancient pottery shards with his Egyptologist uncle. But instead of finding his whiskered and distracted uncle waiting at the airport, the white American boy is met by the police. The authorities are not the only ones interested in the missing scientist. Quick thinking and a little breaking and entering allow Sam to stay one step ahead of his pursuers. But to succeed, Sam will need to hike through rat-infested sewers, crawl through a collapsing tunnel, and escape a speeding box truck. Other than half-Egyptian, half-English Mary, also 13, and her Egyptian minder, Bassem, Sam is alone. Nonstop action and the richly detailed setting are not enough to overcome the overly familiar premise and loosely woven mystery. Sam's ability to elude his would-be captors and discover obscure clues feels false. The revelation of the hidden artifact at the center of the mystery as well as the secret about his family is equally forced and familiar. A dusty plot that is never fully unearthed. (Adventure. 9-13)

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May 1, 2016

Gr 4-7-A mix of "Indiana Jones," National Treasure, and The Da Vinci Code. Sam Force lands in Cairo for his annual summer visit with his Uncle Jason, ready for the usual three months of ancient Egypt tutorial. This year is different, however, because Jason is not there to meet him. Instead, a young taxi driver named Hadi saves Sam from some unsavory police officers, and Sam is off on a search for his lost uncle. In this story that's complete with clues, codes, and puzzles, Sam navigates labyrinthine souks, flies across desert sand dunes on ATVs, outruns hordes of ravenous rats in the sewers of Cairo, and survives being buried inside a World War II ship left stranded in the sand when the Nile shifted course during a storm. Hadi and Mary, a girl Sam met on the plane, are sometimes friends and sometimes foes, making it difficult for Sam to know whom to trust. The pace of the story makes it hard to find a place to bookmark it for the night, but it also means that puzzles are solved a bit too quickly. It never takes Sam more than a page or three to find a clue and solve it, leading him on to the next. Accidents are fortuitous and frequent, leaving readers little opportunity to see Sam solve problems or to get to know him in any depth.

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