This was an audiobook that has 'series' written all over it, although there's nothing on the cover to indicate that. It's aimed at a young middle grade readership, and while I didn't think it was particularly good, it wasn't awful either, so I'm rating it a worthy read because it's not bad for the audience it's aimed at. I just think it could have been better, but the readers who go for this sort of thing are probably not as discerning or critical (or whatever!) as I am.
The story was read pretty decently by Ciaran Saward, and involved a couple of cousins, Lara and Rufus, going to stay with their great uncle at his 'castle' which is a crumbling old mansion on the coast in Cornwall, an English county that's right at the tip of south-western Great Britain. Naturally there's a 'pirate treasure' angle to it, involving an antique relative of the family, but it's not really pirate treasure, it's more like artifacts from ancient Egypt which were purloined or otherwise appropriated and were, for reasons which go unexplored, hidden away in secret location. None of this made any sense to me, much the less the byzantine cryptic clues which the kids, of course, solved.
On the down side, I felt a great educational opportunity was missed here because we learn little to nothing of Cornwall, or of the era in in which the adventurer who originally hid the treasure lived, or of Egyptian antiquities. Naturally no kid wants to read a novel that sounds like a boring and lecturing textbook, but there are plenty of ways for a skilled writer to incorporate some educational content, especially in a treasure hunt where some knowledge of history and customs can readily be made a part of the hunt, and I was sorry those opportunities were missed.
The story is a bit like a Dan Brown for middle-graders, and my problem with that is that I've never bought into this kind of 'cryptic clue hunt' because they're so far-fetched, and it makes even less sense that a small group of kids would be the subject of one incredible adventure after another, as a series of these would demand. Of course, young readers don't care about that! But cryptic clues are silly and cheapen a novel for me, and the improbability of the whole thing is like those cozy mysteries that take place in a little hamlet where the murder rate would make even a seasoned Chicago cop tremble!
No one who is dying of stab wounds is going to work out cryptic clues for Dan Brown's protagonist to solve. He's going to at best write a short note asking the protagonist to contact his granddaughter! That was truly laughable. That same sort of short-sightedness inhabits this story in that the elaborate hiding of the treasure and then the distribution of multiple cascading cryptic clues makes zero sense. Who are the clues aimed at? Why did the guy who initially had the treasure not sell it and enjoy the proceeds for himself, otherwise why did he even steal it in the first place? Did he really believe his clues would be readily soluble two hundred years hence - or even ten years hence? That takes a lot of faith!
That said, it's a reasonably fun adventure for the target audience. The younger boy, Rufus, was just annoying to me, and the girl seemed a bit lacking in oomph. The older boy Tom was also quite flat, but the story itself was innocent enough and fun enough that young middle graders will likely lap it up, so this is why I commend it as a worthy read. It's not for me though, so this series, if there is one, ends with this volume for my purposes.
