Max Tilt

Series · 3 books · 2017-2019

By Peter Lerangis

Books in series

Max Tilt

Fire the Depths

2017

When thirteen-year-old Max Tilt happens upon his great-great-great-grandfather Jules Verne’s unfinished, unpublished manuscript, The Lost Treasures, he doesn’t realize that he’s found the answers to all his problems. And Max has a lot of problems—his mother is sick, his father is out of work, and his home is about to be foreclosed on. But when Max and his cousin Alex discover that Verne’s last work reveals everything he wrote was fact, not fiction, they realize that the book holds the key to something incredibly valuable. A treasure that can save his house—and maybe his entire family. But Max and Alex aren’t the only ones who know about Verne’s clues. Spencer Niemend, a strange skunk-haired man who has spent his life researching Verne’s works, is bent on reshaping the world with the hidden treasure. To find it first, Max and Alex must go on an adventure that’ll take them from the broken remains of an underwater city to the very jaws of a giant squid to the edges of a whirlpool from which no one has ever emerged alive.

Max Tilt

80 Days or Die

2018

The New York Times bestselling author of the Seven Wonders series and of books in the 39 Clues series, Peter Lerangis, brings us the hair-raising, edge-of-your-seat second installment of the Max Tilt trilogy. When thirteen-year-old Max Tilt stumbled across his great-great-great-grandfather Jules Verne’s unfinished, unpublished manuscript, The Lost Treasures, he thought he had the answer to all his problems, but nothing in life is ever that easy. With his mom’s illness getting worse again, Max needs to figure out a way to save his family—now more than ever. So Max and his cousin Alex revisit The Lost Treasures, and they find a clue that just might be the key to a cure. It’s the story of Verne’s seemingly impossible recovery from a near-fatal gunshot wound. Somehow, after being shot, Verne didn’t just survive, he thrived. And the book hints that he was only able to do so after collecting magical healing elements that he’d saved from a race around the world. Piecing together hints from Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and his lost manuscript, Max and Alex realize there’s a way to save Max’s mom if they’re daring enough to try. It’s a race against time in the second installment of the action-packed adventure series from master storyteller and New York Times bestselling author Peter Lerangis.

Enter the Core

2019

The New York Times bestselling author of the Seven Wonders series and of books in the 39 Clues series, Peter Lerangis, brings us the final installment of the thrilling Max Tilt trilogy. Max Tilt thinks his luck is finally changing, thanks to his great-great-great-grandfather Jules Verne’s unfinished, unpublished manuscript, The Lost Treasures. Using the clues Verne left behind, Max and his cousin Alex were able to bottle the magical healing elements needed to cure his mother’s illness just in the nick of time. But then Max and Alex discover that the vials were stolen by their former friend, Bitsy. She has plans to use them to save the world—but her plans might be much more deadly than they seem. And so now it’s up to Max and Alex to stop her before it’s too late. Working against the odds, the two kids glean clues from one of Verne’s best-loved books, Journey to the Center of the Earth. In it, they discover a map to their most dangerous destination yet—the very core of the world. And so now the two cousins are off on their most unlikely, most important quest yet—literally to save the world! It’s the final installment of the riveting adventure series from master storyteller and New York Times bestselling author Peter Lerangis.

Author

Peter Lerangis

Author · 58 books

Lerangis' work includes The Viper's Nest and The Sword Thief, two titles in the children's-book series The 39 Clues, the historical novel Smiler's Bones, the YA dark comedy-adventure novel wtf, the Drama Club series, the Spy X series, the Watchers series, the Abracadabra series, and the Antarctica two-book adventure, as well ghostwriting for series such as the Three Investigators, the Hardy Boys Casefiles, Sweet Valley Twins, and more than forty books in the series The Baby-sitters Club and its various spin-offs.[1] He has also written novels based on film screenplays, including The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow, and Beauty and the Beast, and five video game novelizations in the Worlds of Power series created by Seth Godin.[2] As a ghostwriter he has been published under the name A. L. Singer.[3] Lerangis is the son of a retired New York Telephone Company employee and a retired public-elementary-school secretary, who raised him in Freeport, New York on Long Island. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in biochemistry, while acting in musicals[4] and singing with and musically directing the a cappella group the Harvard Krokodiloes,[5][6] before moving to New York. He worked there as an actor[7] and freelance copy editor for eight years before becoming an author.[8] In 2003, Lerangis was chosen by First Lady Laura Bush to accompany her to the first Russian Book Festival, hosted by Russian First Lady Lyudmila Putina in Moscow.[9][10]Authors R. L. Stine (Goosebumps) and Marc Brown (the Arthur the Aardvark series) also made the trip with Bush.[9] Also in 2003, Lerangis was commissioned by the United Kingdom branch of Scholastic to write X-Isle, one of four books that would relaunch the Point Horror series there.[11] A sequel, Return to X-Isle, was published in 2004. In 2007, Scholastic announced the launch of a new historical mystery series called The 39 Clues, intended to become a franchise.[12] Lerangis wrote the third book in the series, The Sword Thief, published in March 2009.[13][14][15] On March 3, 2009, Scholastic announced that Lerangis would write the seventh book in the series, The Viper's Nest.[14][16] Lerangis lives in New York City with his wife, musician Tina deVaron, and their sons Nick and Joe.[17]