THE MUMMY CASE, by Elizabeth Peters

All novels by this author are worth reading, even early ones from the 70‘s (Summer of the Dragon, for one). They have high chuckle value; they have well-drawn and totally believable characters; the characters act as would be expected (that is, you don’t get a blind character commenting on someone’s blue eyes, or the hero cowering behind a door, or a villain being anything other than villainous); the settings are invariably foreign and properly exotic. Set in the early 1900’s, the historic and cultural themes are very well drawn. The Mummy Case (originally published in 1985), part of the Amelia Peabody series, marks the appearance of the Master Criminal, Amelia’s bete noir. Once again Amelia and her larger-than-life husband Radcliffe Emerson, and their weirdly precocious son Ramses (and his weirdly precocious cat Bastet) investigate a series of crimes in and around their dig on the Giza plain outside Cairo. You could read this as a stand-alone, but months of pleasure await you if you read these books in order published. All in all, a solid 4+.

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