Easy Go should have been my favourite of Micheal Crichton’s early novels. Written under his John Lange pseudonym while Crichton was still in med-school, the book includes some archaeology, some Egyptology, and the idea of a heist.

Barnaby has discovered the possibility of a lost tomb, an undiscovered cache of wealth and a forgotten king. He recruits Pierce who throws together a team and a cover story for an archaeological expedition to Luxor.

They seek out the clues, follow the trail, and find it. But will they be able to get inside it, explore it, and get the treasure out of the country undiscovered by the authorities?

Sounds fun, fast-paced and captivating, right?

And while I love the exploration of the tomb, we also get a bit of a romance shoehorned in between Pierce and their bankroller’s secretary, it feels, towards the end, that Crichton wrote himself into a corner, and wrapped things up too quickly, and the ending feels like a little bit of a let-down, even though there is a clever reveal.

I will say Crichton defines his characters and keeps them all individual with their own style and it’s fun to see how some of the plan progresses, and the way things are planted to make you worry about how things will play out.

I love all the Egyptology stuff, all the familiar discussions about the entombing of mummies, the canopic jars, and the procedures that went into preserving the body for its journey into the afterlife. That made the story really enjoyable, as well as the discovery of the tomb, and how it’s revealed room by room.

It ends up being a fast-paced story but doesn’t quite gel as well as his previous John Lange novels. It’s fun, I just didn’t care for the way things played out in the end. Like I said, it felt a little rushed, and like he’d written himself into a corner and didn’t know how to necessarily get out of it.

That doesn’t make it a bad book, Crichton was a fantastic author, so even some of his lesser tales are still exceptional, and honestly, a few changes towards the final act, and maybe a couple tweaks in the earlier part of the story could make this a really engaging and different kind of heist film if someone wanted to make it into a movie, or limited series.

Crichton’s next novel is a medical thriller, A Case of Need, and introduced a brand new pseudonym, one he used only once, Jeffrey Hudson.