Twelve-year-old Cody and his best friend Eric are spending a typically drowsy summer in Sultana, Manitoba, when the unthinkable happens. With the local MacFie River almost dry because of an extended drought, the business owners of the tourist-dependent, job-challenged small town make some painful cuts to survive. The most painful? Eric’s mother is about to lose her job at the local diner, forcing the family to move elsewhere to find work. Barring a week of solid rain, the best friends are about to be separated forever. How can two tweens revive the local economy and save their friendship?

Cody and Eric soon hatch a plan. What the town needs, they decide, is an instant tourist attraction, and what quicker way to draw tourists than to orchestrate a major archaeological find? With the help of Eric’s twin sister Rachel, the trio creates a clay plaque inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics describing an ancient journey of exploration that ended on the banks of the MacFie. The real trouble starts when a doctor finds the plaque and the plan succeeds beyond the young hoaxers’  wildest expectations.

Andreas Oertel sets a brisk but not overly rushed pace early in the novel and never lets up, placing a series of increasingly complicated obstacles and mysteries in his protagonists’ path until the cinematic conclusion. That conclusion – and the obvious set-up for the next adventure in the series – may be a tad too tidy for more demanding readers, but Oertel has laid the foundation for a fun, engaging series for adventure and history buffs. Hopefully, though, future volumes will give readers a little more time to get to know its central cast of oddball jesters.