Unearthed - by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner

Title: Unearthed
Author: Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner
Published: 9 Jan 2018
Series: Unearthed #1
Rating: 4 stars
Synopsis:
When Earth intercepts a message from a long-extinct alien race, it seems like the solution the planet has been waiting for. The Undying's advanced technology has the potential to undo environmental damage and turn lives around, and Gaia, their former home planet, is a treasure trove waiting to be uncovered.
For Jules Addison and his fellow scholars, the discovery of an alien culture offers unprecedented opportunity for study... as long as scavengers like Amelia Radcliffe don't loot everything first. Mia and Jules' different reasons for smuggling themselves onto Gaia put them immediately at odds, but after escaping a dangerous confrontation with other scavvers, they form a fragile alliance.
In order to penetrate the Undying temple and reach the tech and information hidden within, the two must decode the ancient race's secrets and survive their traps. But the more they learn about the Undying, the more their presence in the temple seems to be part of a grand design that could spell the end of the human race...


I managed to go to a signing/Q&A for this book on their Australian book tour, and was lucky to buy myself a copy.

Unearthed is described as Indiana Jones meets Lara Croft in space. Seeing as I love both Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, I was very eager to read the book!

This book has a few different puzzles for the main characters to try and get through including one using music and another using math. They needed to finish the puzzle to be able to move onto the next.

Meagan Spooner has said that this duology series and The Starbound Trilogy aren't intended to share universes because "Unearthed is near-future science fiction and the Starbound trilogy takes place far, far into mankind's future". However, personally I imagined that these books are all in the same universe.

I loved that Jules was the neat one with the brains and Mia was the one who wanted to kick butt and take what she needed - by force if she had to. But towards the end you could see that the two were trying to help each other and learning from one another too.

What was revealed in the final two paragraphs of Unearthed was quite shocking and left me desperately wanting the next book. The downside to reading this book as soon as I got it? Now having to wait until 2019 for the next one...

Spoilers!

One guess that I did make that I was correct with was that Charlotte and Mink were the same person.

Another part of the book that was quite intriguing other than the puzzle was the part with the spaceship at the end.

End Spoilers!

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All books in this series:

    1 | Unearthed
    2 | Undying