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.
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.
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.
Find Sandstorm at Ever After Books
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.
