Sunday, April 16, 2017

2017/39: The Mummy Case -- Elizabeth Peters

my spirits rose – not, as evil-minded persons have suggested, at the prospect of interfering in matters which were not my concern, but at the imminence of the exquisite Dahshoor pyramids.[loc. 11925]

Emerson and Amelia (and their irritating son Ramses) are sulking about not being permitted to excavate proper pyramids. Instead, they are digging over some mounds of rubble. But everyone perks up when an Egyptian antiquities dealer is found hanged in his shop: not because he is an especially worthy individual, but because all the signs point to murder and mystery, which are as meat and drink to the Emerson family. Yes, even their darling child. (I blame the parents.)

Meanwhile, a village near the dig seems to have been overrun by American missionaries; a German aristocrat with more money than taste appears on the scene, accompanied by her pet lion-cub; Ramses carries out some excavations of his own; and the Egyptians are, in general, morally superior to the Americans, British and European characters.

This is the book where I began to see potential in Ramses (who is, as one character says, 'catastrophically precocious'). His interactions with the cat Bastet are delightful. And Amelia's very Victorian parenting -- even Emerson seems to think she is rather hard on her son -- is, though troublesome to a modern reader, exactly the environment in which a child of intelligence, curiosity and courage thrives. (Besides, she does turn out to have a violently maternal streak.) And it's Ramses whose actions turn the tide of the novel.

Also features a Master Criminal.

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