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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