Tunnels by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams

Tunnels is the first book in the series by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams. Tunnels is broken down into three parts.  The first is Breaking Ground and centers on 14-year old Will Burrows and his archaeology father.  Dr. Burrows and Will have spent many a day excavating below the streets of Highfield,  even finding an underground railroad.  But, when Dr. Burrows begins to behave secretively and then ends up missing, Will enlists the help of his best friend Chester to try and figure out what is going on.  Beneath the Burrows home, Will and Chester find a passage behind a bookshelf.  Slowly they begin to clear it out and find themselves at a doorway into something unknown.   Section two is The Colony and begins around page 164.  For me, this is where the action begins to happen as Will and Chester find themselves in an underground city and end up getting captured.  Will also learns of his link to The Colony.  While Will is set free,  Chester is never allowed to return to the "topsoil."    In Section three,  The Eternal City, Will attempts to rescue Chester while looking for his father.    The story leaves room for a sequel but it resolved one of the main plot points that I kept hoping would not be left for book two.  Overall, I really liked my first jaunt into "Subterranean fiction" Or what Wiki calls " a subgenre of adventure fiction which focuses on underground settings, sometimes at the center of the Earth or otherwise deep below the surface."  Who would have known?  I still have so..so...much to learn. Silly me, thought it was science-fiction.