This was another great installment in the Amelia Peabody series! Usually, my favourite part is the snappy reparte between Amelia and Emerson, with whatever mystery or mayhem they're trying to solve being secondary. But in this outing, the actual story was pretty fascinating.The Emerson family become caught up in the mystery involving a long-ago friend of Emerson's who disappeared with his young, beautiful wife years ago, while trying to find a lost civilization. A note has been delivered to the family, suggesting that they are still alive after all this time. Through a typically convoluted set of circumstances, the Emersons end up leading the expedition to find and rescue them.But, as is always the case when the Emersons are involved, things go awry. The Emersons - including Ramses, who continues to be hilariously precocious and a thorn in his mother's side - not only find the lost civilization, but become either guests or captives - depending on who you listen to.In order to leave, they must figure out the complicated politics and intrigues related to the competition for who will become the next king of the civilization. Needless to say, both Amelia and Emerson are in their usual fine, interfereing form as they attempt to not only help the right king to ascend, but to figure out a way to not be put to death and get to go home to England.As always, Elizabeth Peters writes a wonderful story, with the main characters on full display with all their delightful quirks, and the supporting characters interesting, likeable and well-developed. I loved this story!
I pecked away at the first half of this novel, dutifully reading a few pages a day—not high praise for a mystery novel. Of the various elements that can keep a reader engaged, (plot, character, theme, etc.), the only one that worked for me was setting. I was intrigued with insights into problems of survival in the Sahara, as well as information regarding ancient Egypt and archeology (which I presume was, to some degree, authentic). The plot picked up toward the end, and I was able to get engaged enough to finish the book.However, I found Amelia too self-congratulatory, her husband Emerson a brutish bore, and their son Ramses pedantic and unrealistic. I had no particular desire to get to know the characters well and very little emotional investment in their survival. In the first chapters, no plausible reason was given for why several camels dropped dead, one after another, and it occurred to me they might have died of boredom.Elizabeth Peters’ books fill considerable shelf space at my favorite used book store, so I can only assume that she has an audience. The chemistry just isn’t right for me, though, and I doubt if I’ll pick up another of her books any time soon.
Do You like book The Last Camel Died At Noon (2015)?
If there's one device I've come to hate in literature and on television, it's when a story starts in media res with what will turn out to be the climactic action scene and then rewinds all the way back to the beginning. It's only in the past few years that this device has become almost omnipresent on television, so I was somewhat surprised that Peters uses it at the start of this book. Perhaps it was a new and exciting thing when she did it in 1991. At any rate, I can't blame her too much for this lapse in judgment when the rest of the book is so genuinely exciting. Amelia and Emerson go to an archaeological dig in Sudan instead of their usual Egypt, but they don't get very far with their excavations this time, as they are lured out into the desert on a quest and end up discovering a lost civilization. I'll confess that the usual Egyptian settings of the Peabody stories had seemed a little humdrum to me during the last few books, so it's nice that we had a change of scenery and got to explore a living civilization instead of a dead one this time. All in all, it was a fun read, and as usual, I'm looking forward to the next one!
—Marne Wilson
Book number 6 in Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody (think female Victorian Indiana Jones) series, which sees Amelia, her husband Radcliffe and son Ramses back in the dusty climes of Egypt following their adventures in the previous ( The Deeds of the Disturber).I have to say, though, that the plot of this one is more-than-slightly reminiscent of H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, pretty much just swapping the African setting and characters of that novel for the dusty climes of Egypt - a similarity that Emerson, in a bit of meta-fiction, himself complains about. Throw in a dash of She (also by H Rider Haggard) with a soupcon of intrigue and more entertaining byplay between the Emerson's (with Ramses his usual precocious self), and the result is another entertaining read in the series.
—David
This series is NOT the series I thought it was. Either that, or, after enjoying the Vicky Bliss book I read, I wanted to read Peter's universe in order. Not quite sure why I got this instead of the first VB book, now.For a historical fiction book, it's great. EXACTLY what people who enjoy Victorian era books would enjoy. I, however, am fickle and didn't enjoy just *how* historically accurate the tone of the book was. Because of this, I didn't enjoy the characters. Then there was the plot, which didn't really grab me. The two combined? I think think I'll stick with Vicky Bliss and forgo reading Amelia Peabody books.
—Jesi
