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When all but one member of the Keeper's Group is killed in a tragic accident, the remaining ninety-seven-year-old Su-Lin Song Chou—with the help of Indira, a self-aware, ever-evolving AI app—plans to recruit members for the group. Established to keep Electra Kittner's memory alive, the group has met annually since Electra's disappearance twenty years ago. Now Su-Lin, with Indira's assistance, contacts the four orphans for whom she serves as guardian. Posing as Su-Lin's assistant, Indira sends twins Alonzo and Eve Carter and twins Nila and Nari Bose on a mission to Cairo to meet a contact who will give them something with which they are to return. Electra's old enemies threaten them, and the four are increasingly troubled by what they are not being told about the mission and their mysterious contact.
This book is the first in the Keepers series, the sequel to the author's five-book series The Lightning Brain, which centers on the life, amazing abilities, and high intellect of Electra. This first novel gives hints to the four orphans' potential abilities who are given the Cairo mission. Ratza establishes the intricate bond between the two sets of twins and their relationships to each other in a flow of dialogue that reveals individual personalities as well. Filled with marvelous descriptions of Egypt, its history, and mythology, this is one of those books that offers insights into its setting's cultural aspects while advancing the plot of an epic tale. As readers follow the group through their many treacherous adventures in Egypt and the odd communications with Indira, they too will ask themselves: "What is it we're not being told?"