Max McCoy

The fourth and final Indiana Jones book from author Max McCoy, Secret of the Sphinx is unfortunately also the least of them. It has the flaws of its predecessor, Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs, in that it rushes through its plot and character moments. However, it compounds these flaws by trying to cram in too much; in the less than 300 pages of this breezy novel, Indy quests for four separate artefacts across three continents, and it's too much to be able to invest in any one of them.

The opening act sees Indy in Japan-occupied China raiding an emperor's lost tomb – it's quite well done and perhaps the best part of the book, invoking a tense atmosphere and traps in the tomb itself and establishing a serviceable villain in the Imperial spymaster Sokai. However, by a rather tenuous link we then find ourselves in the company of a couple of travelling English magicians and negotiate a typhoon, an island leper colony and an Indian black magic practitioner in Calcutta. These are good adventure-serial trappings – there's even a flying boat, which is always nice – but nearly half the book is done, and we're only just starting the main plot.

Two artefacts are sought simultaneously: the biblical Staff of Aaron mentioned in Exodus and the 'Omega Book' in which all of man's past, present and future is supposedly written. The first is particularly interesting, clearly reminiscent of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but is almost pathetically resolved: they are just given the Staff by some Yazidis they happen to bump into while on the trail of their first clue. The second, the Omega Book, becomes the focus, but develops an absurdity in that it is the Japanese villain on Indy's tail, backed by Japanese soldiers – who are presumably in uniform, even though they are now in Egypt. It's halting and underwhelming storytelling, and quickly resolved. There's then an extended final act following a fourth artefact, the Crystal Skull, which is unconnected to the main plot and seems to be tying up a plot point from McCoy's earlier Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth (a much superior book, by the way).

It is too much for such a light book to cover, and consequently none of it nestles in with the sort of Saturday-afternoon ease that the films created so effortlessly. Even if comparing the book to the films is unfair – though we wait to see what The Dial of Destiny will do for the reputation of the franchise when it's released in a couple of months – Secret of the Sphinx also compares unfavourably to Max McCoy's previous Indy books. There's a lack of patience in the storytelling and, most disappointingly, no actual clues or mysteries or riddles for Indy to solve at any point. It's all just sort of railroaded along at speed, like that mining-cart set-piece in Temple of Doom.

Nevertheless, despite that lack of patience in the storytelling, there is still storytelling on show here. An Indiana Jones adventure is strong enough simply by being an Indiana Jones adventure; globe-trotting, chasing ancient artefacts and punching fascist villains can never not be fun, even if it's not always good. In truth, I'm not the right person to review Secret of the Sphinx: I love without reservation treasure hunts and lost cities and anything of that nature, and find it impossible to dislike the book. More objective readers, however, would certainly mark it lower.… (meer)

A pleasant piece of pulp, even if it doesn't reach that level of magical pulp that infuses the Indiana Jones movies. The novels in this franchise are a known quantity: they're only for fans craving a little more, and there's an unspoken acceptance that they can't be anything other than a pale imitation of the real thing. You know none of them are going to blow you away. There's no chance of the reader unearthing a hidden gem – that's a feat that remains exclusively reserved for everyone's favourite treasure-hunting archaeologist.

Accepting this, then, the reader settles down for a routine Indiana Jones thrill, and that's what they get. The MacGuffin is an interesting one: the prospect of live dinosaurs in unexplored Mongolia, and of a 'missing link' tribe of Stone Age humans. It is, in essence, an agreeable and simplified mix of Lost Horizon and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Even allowing for the obligatory skirmish with the Nazis in the bookend chapters, Dinosaur Eggs felt like something other than just a rehash of standard Indiana Jones tropes. Hypervigilant fans will nit-pick that Indy doesn't always seem like the Indy we know and love, but I quite liked how fresh it all felt.

Having said that, it is the least of the three Indy novels by Max McCoy that I've read (I've yet to open Secret of the Sphinx). It's a disappointment that Indy doesn't have to do much (if anything) in the way of puzzle-solving or questing; he only has to journey to a place, fight, then journey back. On my shelf, Dinosaur Eggs is noticeably slimmer than the other McCoy novels: it rushes through its plot, its character conflicts and its resolutions to Indy's predicaments. The storytelling is a bit artless: any tension is bled out by its hastiness, and we aren't allowed to pause even for a moment to savour the wonder at the 'lost world' Indy discovers.

But, in the end, any flaws in the book are easily forgiven, because it's an Indiana Jones book. You could just write the sentence "It's an Indiana Jones adventure" and have covered all the necessary bases for a review. To people thinking about reading this, the quality almost doesn't matter. You'll read Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs only if you have an itch to scratch – and this it satisfies.… (meer)