PerfectBound e-book extras: "Egytian Diary: The Amelia Peabody Expedition"; "A Nice, Practical Career for a Woman": A Conversation with Elizabeth Peters; "The Amelia Peabody Mysteries"

It is 1917, and the Great War rages. In Luxor, Amelia Peabody and her family learn that a royal tomb has been ransacked. Not soon after, one thief returns to the tomb -- as a corpse. Peabody to the investigation!

Dateline: New Year’s Eve, l9l7. Risking winter storms and German torpedoes, the Emersons are heading for Egypt once again: intrepid Egyptologist Amelia Peabody, her brilliant archaeologist husband Radcliffe Emerson, their son Ramses and his wife Nefret, not to mention their ward, their butler and their cat. Emerson is counting on a long season of excavation without distractions, but loyal readers know this is a forlorn hope. Another dead body, only too fresh, is found in a looted tomb, and it leads the clan on a search for the man who has threatened them with death if they pursue their excavations. If that weren’t distraction enough, the intelligence services are trying to recruit Ramses for another dangerous assignment--and this is one he can’t refuse. Meanwhile, Nefret keeps a secret of her own...

Following last year’s New York Times bestselling sensation Lord of the Silent, here is intrigue, suspense, and heart-stopping adventure featuring fiction’s beloved archaeologist-sleuth.

When I am in one of my philosophical moods, I am inclined to wonder whether all families are as difÞcult as mine.

I was in such a mood as I dressed for dinner on the penultimate evening of our voyage. We would dock at Alexandria in two days, unless, of course, the ship was sunk by a German torpedo. A winter voyage from England to Egypt is never comfortable; but in that fateful December of 1916, after more than two years of war, the possibility of submarine attack had been added to the perils of rough seas and stormy weather.

I was not thinking of that danger -- for I make it a habit never to worry about matters that are beyond my control -- nor of the difÞculty of trying to keep my footing while the þoor of the cabin rose and fell and the oil lamps swung wildly on their brackets -- for mine is the sort of mind that rises above such things -- but perhaps these considerations did affect me more than I realized, giving a pessimistic cast to my normally cheerful reþections.

Mind you, I had no legitimate grounds for complaint about my immediate family. My husband, Radcliffe Emerson, is the most distinguished Egyptologist of this or any other era. His sapphirine-blue eyes, the cleft, or dimple, in his strong chin, his thick sable hair, and muscular but symmetrical frame are additional attractions to me and, I regret to say, to innumerable other females.

He has a few minor eccentricities: his command of invective, which has earned him the Egyptian sobriquet of Father of Curses, his explosive temper, his autocratic, arbitrary method of dealing with the authorities of the Service des Antiquités, which had led in the past to our being barred from most of the interesting sites in Egypt...

Well, but no proud mother could have asked for a better son than mine. Ramses had been named for his Uncle Walter, but everyone called him by the nickname given him by his father in infancy. He was as handsome and intellectually gifted as his father, idealistic, kind, and courageous...A little too courageous, perhaps? He had been one of the most infuriating children I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, and his reckless disregard for danger, when he believed the cause he supported to be morally right, was one trait that I had been unable to eradicate. The most terrifying of his adventures had occurred during the winter of 1914-15, when he had taken on a secret assignment for the War OfÞce. He and his best friend, David, had completed their mission successfully, but both had been seriously injured, and Ramses's true identity had been exposed to agents of the Central Powers. I had hoped his marriage would sober him, but although he was as passionately attached to his beautiful wife as Emerson was to my humble self, Nefret had not been the calming inþuence for which I had hoped. She would have thrown herself in front of a charging lion if Ramses were its destined prey, but what I wanted was someone who would prevent him from provoking lions in the Þrst place.

Nefret had been our ward, dear as a daughter, before she married our son. As a Þrm believer in the equality of the female gender, I could only approve the determination with which she had achieved against considerable odds her goal of qualifying as a surgeon. As a person of high moral principles I could only commend her for spending part of her large fortune in establishing in Cairo a hospital for women that served even the lowest and most despised members ofthat sex. If only she would consent to settle down -- devote her ardent energies to medicine and to archaeology, and to Ramses -- and perhaps...

 

Elizabeth Peters was born and brought up in Illinois and earned her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago's famed Oriental Institute. Peters was named Grandmaster at the inaugural Anthony Awards in 1986 and Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America at the Edgar Awards in 1998. She lives in an historic farmhouse in western Maryland with six cats and two dogs. Her Amelia Peabody novels published by PerfectBound are (in chronological order): Lion in the Valley; The Ape Who Guards the Balance; The Falcon at the Portal; He Shall Thunder in the Sky; Lord of the Silent; The Golden One.

 

 

The Golden One by Elizabeth Peters
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