Wednesday, 29 January 2020

Elizabeth Peters - The Mummy Case


Rating: 4/5

Review:
Great fun

This is terrific fun. Elizabeth Peters writes extremely well and her mock-Victorian adventure is amusing and rather gripping. Set in the mid-1890s, Egyptologists Amelia Peabody, her husband Emerson and their disturbingly but amusingly precocious young son Ramses set out for Egypt, where they become embroiled in a mystery involving the theft of antiquities, murder and a Sinister Master Criminal.

The plot is slightly silly but involving enough, and anyway it’s not the point here. The pleasure of the book is in Peters’s writing, which is a very entertaining parody of a Rider Haggard-style ripping yarn. Narrated in the first person by Amelia, we see her fabulous self-delusion but also her genuine intelligence and passion for Egyptian antiquities. Peters herself was an Egyptologist so the archaeological background is accurate and rather interesting, the prose is a joy and the whole thing is thoroughly enjoyable.

Not a classic of detective fiction, but a Jolly Good Read and I’ll be trying more of this series for sure.

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