Easy Go

Easy Go is a novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, his third to be published. It appeared in 1968 under the pen name John Lange, was reissued by Bantam Books in 1974 as The Last Tomb, and was republished under Crichton's own name by Hard Case Crime in 2013.

Harold Barnaby is an Egyptologist who has found a hidden message in a set of hieroglyphics while translating them, and the message describes the tomb of an unnamed pharaoh that nobody has ever located. He has the knowledge to read it and not the influence to act on it, since the Egyptian authorities would certainly take the discovery over if they heard about it.

In a moment of drunken indiscretion he tells a freelance writer named Robert Pierce, who is between jobs and looking for excitement. Pierce has friends in useful places, and he offers to plan the extraction for a share, bringing in an earl to pay for it, a smuggler and an international thief. The novel follows the party in the desert as the dig runs on far longer than anyone expected.