The publisher of The 39 Clues, a multimedia, interactive adventure series aimed at kids 8 to 12, touts it as “adrenaline-charged.”No adrenaline is included, but just about everything else is: books, cards, online games and $100,000 in prizes. DreamWorks has optioned the movie rights.The first of the 10 books, The 39 Clues: Book One: The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan (Scholastic, 220 pp., $12.99), is full of promise and introduces two appealing, mistreated young orphans.The book and website (the39clues.com) are stuffed with teasers that will entice or annoy readers – or are they contestants? It helps to have patience for codes, anagrams and mazes.Set in the present, the book begins with Grace Cahill revising her will five minutes before dying. Her relatives can choose their inheritance: $1 million each or clues to a secret that will reveal what makes the family so powerful.The orphans, bookish Amy Cahill, 14, and her mischievous brother Dan, 11, take the challenge, as do six sets of conveniently villainous rivals.With the first clue (each book has one, the rest will be revealed online), they’re off to Philadelphia to research Benjamin Franklin, who’s related to the Cahills, like other famous figures. Then, it’s on to Paris’ catacombs, where Franklin himself left a clue.The books can be read alone. Prizes will be won online, with the help of cards that come with the books. More help will be offered in four additional card packs at $6.99 each.A multidimensional platform has worked before, notably with Frank Beddor’s best-selling kids series, The Looking Glass Wars.Riordan, who outlined the series to be completed by other writers, is off to a good start. Author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books, he’s funny in a way kids like. He mixes lessons in history and math with an adventure.But will magic strike as it did for other series with heroic orphans – J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events? Young readers gradually made them publishing phenomena before grown-up marketing set in.Despite all its off-the-page enhancements, The 39 Clues will rise or fall on the strength of its story, and that’s best told, so far, in the book. The next one, One False Note, by Gordon Korman, is due Dec. 2.

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