Books Like Indiana Jones: 9 Adventure Novels Full of Tombs, Traps and Treasure
Globe-trotting archaeological thrillers for anyone who thinks a library should come with a whip
Few films rewired the adventure story like Indiana Jones. Whether your favourite is Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade, the formula is irresistible: a scholar with a whip and a bad attitude towards snakes, an ancient artefact with a body count, a rival on the same trail, and a plot that leaps from dusty lecture hall to booby-trapped tomb before the opening credits feel finished. It is history with the safety catch off, and it makes archaeology look like the most dangerous job on earth.
The good news for readers is that this exact flavour (globe-trotting archaeology, lost cities, puzzles and traps, ruthless pulpy pacing) is a thriving corner of the bookshop. When someone comes into Ever After Books asking for the reading equivalent of that rolling boulder, these are the nine we press into their hands.
What to read if you love Indiana Jones
Sahara by Clive Cussler
Dirk Pitt is the closest thing modern thrillers have to Indy in a wetsuit. This one sends him up the Niger river on the trail of a lost Confederate ironclad and a spreading toxic plague, colliding with a warlord, a desert fortress and some gloriously improbable escapes along the way. Cussler shares the films' love of impossible historical MacGuffins and their refusal to let plausibility slow down a good chase. Start here and there are twenty-plus Pitt adventures queued up behind it.
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Seven Ancient Wonders by Matthew Reilly
If Raiders is a rollercoaster, Reilly is the rollercoaster with the brakes cut. A small multinational team races rival superpowers to reassemble the golden capstone of the Great Pyramid, fighting through trap-filled ancient sites that would make even Indy sweat. Nobody alive writes set pieces at this velocity: expect a cliffhanger roughly every four pages and diagrams of the traps. The trade-off is subtlety, but you will be turning pages far too fast to miss it.
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Sandstorm by James Rollins
Rollins is the natural heir to the archaeological thriller, and Sandstorm launches his long-running Sigma Force series with an explosion in the British Museum and a hunt for Ubar, the lost city swallowed by the Arabian sands. He grounds the adventure in real archaeology and speculative science more carefully than most, so the ancient mystery actually holds together when the answers arrive. Perfect if you like your tombs with footnotes as well as firefights.
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The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Yes, you have heard of it, and there is a reason. Robert Langdon is the puzzle-solving professor half of Indy, minus the whip, plus a murder in the Louvre and a trail of ciphers threaded through real art and architecture across Europe. The pleasure is the riddle-a-chapter structure and the sense that every painting and cathedral is hiding something. Swap tomb traps for cryptography and the itch being scratched is exactly the same.
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Thunderhead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
An archaeologist follows her missing father's trail to Quivira, a fabled city of gold hidden in the slot canyons of the American Southwest. This is the most authentically archaeological novel on the list (Preston has ridden that terrain himself), full of survey grids, potsherds and expedition politics, and then it tips slowly from adventure into genuine horror. Come for the dig-site detail, stay for the mounting dread.
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King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
The great-grandfather of the whole genre, published in 1885, and a direct ancestor of Indiana Jones himself. Allan Quatermain leads an expedition into unmapped country in search of a legendary diamond mine, armed with a hand-drawn map, a hidden mountain pass and sheer stubbornness. It is a Victorian novel with Victorian attitudes, so it shows its age in places, but the treasure-map DNA of every adventure film you love starts here.
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Congo by Michael Crichton
An expedition races into the rainforest to find the lost city of Zinj and the diamond deposits beneath it, guided by a gorilla who speaks sign language and stalked by something that guards the ruins. Crichton bolts techno-thriller machinery onto a classic lost-city plot, complete with corporate rivals and countdown deadlines, and the result moves like a landslide. Ideal if you want your ancient mystery with a cold scientific shiver running underneath.
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The Eight by Katherine Neville
A cult classic that splits its story between 1970s Algiers and the French Revolution, as two women in different centuries hunt the scattered pieces of a chess service once owned by Charlemagne, said to conceal a formula worth killing for. It is more puzzle-box than punch-up, but the sweep of it, the historical cameos and the feeling of an ancient game played out across centuries are pure Saturday-matinee adventure.
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The Lost City of Z by David Grann
The one true story on the list. Percy Fawcett, the Edwardian explorer who kept vanishing into the Amazon in search of a lost civilisation, was among the real-life models for cinema's archaeologist heroes, and Grann retraces his final, fatal 1925 expedition while investigating what the jungle has revealed since. It reads like a thriller and lands with the weight of fact. The perfect chaser once the fiction has you hooked on lost cities.
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Keep the streak going
Once the fedora fits, it is hard to take off. Tell What Should I Read Next? what you loved about these and it will map your next expedition, stack your finds on your TBR list, and go digging through our Thrillers collection for more tombs, traps and treasure.