Treasure Hunters: Peril at the Top of the World is the fourth installment in the exciting Treasure Hunters series by James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein. The story follows the Kidd family, a group of treasure hunters who travel the globe to protect the world's most precious treasures and ancient artifacts. The book opens with the Kidd family—twins Bick and Beck, their older siblings Storm and Tommy, and their parents—going undercover in Florence, Italy, to thwart a gang of thugs attempting to smuggle a stolen mummy sarcophagus. After successfully apprehending the criminals, they discover that these thugs are part of a larger art-stealing organization called the Enlightened Ones. With limited information, the Kidds learn that the Enlightened Ones may be targeting the lost Fabergé Eggs, a Russian treasure. This prompts the family to head to Russia in hopes of finding the eggs before the thieves. While visiting a Russian museum, they receive a cryptic letter from the Enlightened Ones, hinting at the location of their treasure-filled lair. As their father departs to investigate these clues, the rest of the family remains in Russia, focusing on locating valuable paintings that are soon stolen from the very museum they had just visited.
Though the book was meant to be centered around the Kidds finding the stolen painting from the Enlightened Ones, they decide to quite randomly head out to Antarctica to document the pollution and the melting of the ice caps there. Though these are important problems, the treasure-hunting aspect of this book, for which many (me included) read this book series, was quite thin. Besides the clues that they receive yet just forward to their dad to take care of, whose search isn’t even documented, the book just doesn’t focus on treasure hunting much. The only saving grace is that towards the end, they do end up solving the clues together and confronting the thief, but the majority of the book does not focus on treasure-hunting at all.