I hit a Crichton speed bump...
...in his old Egyptian heist book.
This’ll be short and sweet, because the book was pretty basic. EASY GO is one of eight “John Lange” novels written by Crichton while he was in med school. It’s the find of fiction that makes you want to learn the history behind it, and it feels like he personally spent time in Egypt to get the feel of it all. He uses the five senses rather well in this story.
Should I do some funny fake casting for this? Let’s do some funny fake casting for this.
Our main character is Barnaby, an Egyptologist who has struck out in life and decides to stage a heist in an Egyptian tomb. He reads some ancient documents and deciphers the location of one that has been lost to history. Using some sleight-of-hand and jiggery pokery, he can ransom the contents of the tomb for
but he needs help. Time for a montage, let’s assemble the team!
First up: Lord Grover, a D-list British nobleman who is fat and wealthy and constantly banging a diverse array of disposable whores. Sometimes he likes gingers, sometimes he likes Asians. What we can easily predict is that he doesn’t like Africans oh whoops.
He funds the operation, popping in from time to time with a pair of new idiot bimbos and it is either implied or directly stated that he’ll be in his tent nailing the hell out of them while everyone else is digging up the desert.
Then there’s Conway, another vanilla team member who is kind of just there to be a mirror of Barnaby, but not as academically saturated. They work together on the dig.
Fourth member of the team is a guy named Nikos who might be Greek or Sicilian or Arab or Egyptian or whatever, he’s the ethnic everyman with a hundred identities and he can speak a handful of languages, so he moves everyone between the seams.
The final member is Lisa, a buxom blonde who probably wants to bang Barnaby, but she’s intelligent and plays hard to get so that their un-relationship can have an arc in the story. As the heist unfolds and hits unforeseen obstacles, they get closer together, culminating in a marriage proposal at the end of the book. She’s also Lord Grover’s goddaughter (although Grover wanted to bang/marry her when she turned 18, because if you recall, he’s Horny On Main AF, and Lisa has big bewbs.)
Even if the story isn’t entirely predictable, it’s utterly familiar, resulting in a run-of-the-mill genre piece against a lesser-known backdrop, with a few exciting one-off moments. These Lange books are pretty disposable. They’re good summer reads, something you can get through while on vacation when you don’t want to think too hard. That’s not a knock, it’s a feature, and it’s fine for what it is.
Not everything he wrote was JURASSIC PARK, after all.
Content-wise, there wasn’t really much language, just the regular implication of copious intercourse between Grover and [name of whore here]. I won’t spoil the ending of the book just in case you want to read it. That is all, carry on as you were.