Reading out of loyalty to a favorite author

Guardian of the Horizon, Elizabeth Peters

Elizabeth Peters was the first author whose books I bought regularly in hardcover, as they came out.  It seemed like a marker of adulthood, to pay more than $20 for a book, rather than waiting for a copy at the library or haunting used-book stores.  And I faithfully bought "the new Amelia" each year.  Actually, a friend and I bought them for each other - the friend who introduced me to her books in the first place.  So in 2004, when Guardian of the Horizon came out, I drove over to Murder by the Book for a lovely first edition, signed by the author.  However, for the first time, and deliberately, I set this book aside.  I wanted to buy it to support Ms. Peters, but I was reluctant to read it.  It's been on the TBR shelves ever since.

I had two concerns about the book.  For those who haven't read the series, spoilers will follow.

First, it is a "gap" story, written to retroactively fill in the missing years in the Emerson family history.  Set in 1907-1908, it falls smack in the middle of what I call the "Ramses and Nefret" drama, when Ramses is agonizingly in love with Nefret, who is completely oblivious.  I think Ramses is a wonderfully romantic hero, but paradoxically I get so very, very tired of his romantic agony.  He is lucky to have David willing to listen to him go on about it.  Second, in this book the Emersons return to the "Lost Oasis," also known as "The City of the Holy Mountain."  There, like tomb paintings come to life, the world of ancient Egypt survives in a hilltop community deep in the Sudan, frozen in time since its ancestors fled south.  The Emersons first visited this world in The Last Camel Died at Noon, which is an explicit homage to H. Rider Haggard's stories.  It's never been my favorite in the series, and I wasn't anxious to revisit the place.

Last week I learned that Elizabeth Peters left the manuscript for a final Amelia book when she died.  It will be published in 2016, as The Painted Queen.  I have mixed emotions about that, as I do with Terry Pratchett's posthumous Tiffany Aching book.  But I enjoyed the last late Amelia book that I read, A River in the Sky, more than I expected, which gives me hope.  Thinking about the new book finally motivated me to read this one, as did my project to read from the back end of my TBR list (the books that have been on it the longest).

I did not love this book, though there were things I enjoyed.  It opens with the Emersons at their English home in Kent, somewhat at loose ends.  Emerson has gotten them banned from excavating in the Valley of the Kings, after picking a fight with Theodore Davis, the American who holds the excavating rights there.  They are all increasingly bored and frustrated when a young man arrives, bringing a message from Tarek, the ruler of the City, asking them to come to his aid.  Agreeing to help means a lot of work, and also a lot of plotting, to protect the secret of the City.  This part was fun, with all the familiar work of organization and travel to Egypt, meeting familiar faces along the way.  They included Sethos, the "Master Criminal," one of my favorite supporting characters.  I think I enjoyed the group's travel in Egypt more, having read Toby Wilkerson's wonderful book about the Nile earlier this year.

Once they all arrived in the City, though, my interest quickly waned.  In the first story, The Last Camel, there is an energy in discovering the city, Egypt's past brought to life, but this time it felt a bit repetitive.  The story revolves around a usurper to the throne, and his psychopathic son, as well as a plot to force Nefret back into her role as the High Priestess of Isis.  I know I was supposed to root for Tarek, but I got tired of the plotting, and all the rushing around, and particularly of the residents' tendency to worship the Emersons as "holy ones."  I love their sang-froid and overwhelming self-confidence, not to mention their supposed magical powers, but turning them into little gods was too much for me.  One of the plotters is a fellow Briton, who followed rumors of their earlier adventures to find the Lost City.  At the end of the book, he is left there as a "British agent" - appointed presumably by the Emersons - to protect the city against "the next invaders," which was also too much for me.  I would like to think that Elizabeth Peters had her tongue firmly in her cheek when she came up with that idea, but it didn't read that way to me.  I feel queasy over the rifles that the Emersons bring with them to the city, and presumably leave behind, to fuel the next civil war (while the ammunition lasts).

I complained above about Ramses' romantic wallowing, so it's inconsistent to complain about what happens in this book, but I'm going to do it anyway.  Along the way the Emersons pick up a young Egyptian woman, Daria, who is the companion of a Great White Hunter type.  She tries to seduce Ramses one night, he nobly resists.  She ends up traveling to the City with them, where she and Ramses do fall into bed - and improbably, into love.  He is actually thinking of marrying her by the end, wondering how to present his parents with a courtesan as a daughter-in-law, before she decides to stay in the City and marry Tarek  (she does sob bitterly over this decision).  The one-night stand made sense, but I just couldn't buy a love affair, even if Ramses hadn't spent so much time mooning over his Grand Passion for Nefret.  I can't remember if there are any references to this affair in the later books (paradoxically written earlier).  Maybe Elizabeth Peters just wanted a break from the Ramses/Nefret drama.

I gave this book three stars on LibraryThing, mostly out of loyalty to Elizabeth Peters (a one- or two-star book goes to the library sale).  Of her books, this only leaves The Night of the Four Hundred Rabbits on the TBR shelves.

Do you buy books out of loyalty to favorite authors?  Have you found some of them disappointing?

A trio of thrillers

I read three books in a row last week that would be shelved in the mystery section of the bookstore, but they were more novels of suspense than traditional whodunits.  They had little in common, in terms of plot and setting, but they were all three great fun to read.

A River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters

Published in 2010, this is Elizabeth Peters' last book.  It features her most popular characters, Amelia Peabody and her husband Radcliffe Emerson, as well as the usual supporting cast of their son Ramses and adopted daughter Nefret, their young friend David, the inquisitive butler Gargery, and Egyptian assistants Daoud and Selim.  Unusually for a Peters book, though, there is only one cat, who makes just a single cameo appearance.  The setting is also unusual: rather than working in Egypt, the Emersons are drawn to Palestine, where Ramses is already working on a dig in Samaria.  Since Emerson has been banned from excavating in Egypt, he and Amelia are at something of a loose end when they are approached by a Major Morley, who claims to have an ancient scroll that reveals the location of the lost Ark of the Covenant.  He intends to travel to Jerusalem and find it (the theme song from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" immediately began playing in my head).  Though Emerson all but throws him bodily out, at the request of His Majesty's government he later agrees to follow Morley to Palestine and keep an eye on him.  Meanwhile, Ramses stumbles upon evidence that the German government might be trying to stir up trouble for the British in the area.  I thought this was a really fun read, with Amelia in particularly fine form.  Though the last book written, it is set earlier in the series, in 1911.  Elizabeth Peters had begun filling in some of the gap years with her last books (as Laurie R. King is doing with her next Russell and Holmes book).  This one is set just before the big Romantic Drama with Ramses and Nefret takes center stage - a storyline I find a bit tedious, while fully appreciating Ramses as the Romantic Hero.  I'm glad there were only hints of it here.  I still have one more of the Emerson books to read, Guardian of the Horizon.  I've been putting it off because it's a return to the setting of The Last Camel Died at Noon, Peters' homage to H. Rider Haggard, which with all due respect to one of my favorite authors, I find a little silly.


To Dwell in Darkness, Deborah Crombie

It has been a long nineteen months since Deborah Crombie left us with an awful cliff-hanger on the last page of The Sound of Broken Glass. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak last Friday at Murder by the Book. I had just finished this new one earlier in the day, in case she left us hanging like that again. Which she does, but I found the ending here less frustrating.  (Ms. Crombie seemed disappointed when I told her that.)  This story revolves around London's St Pancras Station (in her talk, Ms. Crombie mentioned that she is having a love affair with Victorian architecture). Duncan Kincaid, formerly of Scotland Yard, has been transferred and effectively demoted, without explanation, to head a murder investigation team out of Holborn Police Station.  When a group of eco-protesters, intending to set off a smoke bomb in St Pancras, instead sets off a white-phosphorous bomb, killing the young man holding it, the case lands on Duncan's desk.  As he and his team investigate, they find that the protest group is not exactly what it seems, particularly one member, who in the wake of the incident has disappeared.  Meanwhile, Duncan's former sergeant Gemma, now his wife and an  officer herself, is tracking a young woman's killer.  But her own sergeant, Melody Talbot, who was present when the bomb went off, is drawn more into helping Duncan with his case.  Here also I enjoyed meeting these characters again, they feel like old friends.  While Gemma's case is a traditional police procedural, Duncan's felt more like a thriller, and with the terrorist element, very much of the moment.  It also links to the previous two stories in intriguing and rather disturbing ways.  On the other hand, the book does feature a litter of adorable kittens (though at one point, I was distinctly uneasy about their fate).  I really hope it won't be eighteen months before the next book.


The Traveller Returns, Patricia Wentworth

How appropriate that my Hodder re-print of this book has a quote from Mary Stewart, though "Very well written" isn't the most exciting blurb.  Reading this, I was instantly reminded of The Ivy Tree.  The book opens with Anne Jocelyn returning to England in mid-1944.  Everyone thought she was dead, shot on a beach in Brittany as her husband Philip tried to rescue her by boat from the advancing Nazis.  Philip brought the body of his wife home and buried her.  Now Anne arrives, insisting that in the confusion of the evacuation he made a mistake: it was her cousin Annie Joyce who was shot, while she was left behind to face the Germans.  Her cousin Lyndall and Aunt Milly stifle their doubts and welcome her home.  Philip however refuses to accept her.  I admit, in the first three chapters, I changed my mind about Anne four times.  I wasn't the only one, though an old friend of Annie Joyce is sure that she would know the difference between the two.  That old friend, Nellie Collins, meets Miss Maud Silver on a train up to London, and tells her the whole story.  When Miss Collins is later found dead from an apparent road accident, Miss Silver calls the police.  Meanwhile, Lyndall follows Anne into a beauty shop and overhears some very disturbing words, which she eventually brings to Miss Silver.  Ensconced in her cozy sitting room with her knitting, Miss Silver still manages to stay one step ahead of the police, though the plodding Chief Detective Lamb ignores her suggestions and scoffs at her deductions - until she is proved right, and then he claims all the credit.  His sergeant Frank Abbott, an old friend of Miss Silver's, is smarter than his boss and will probably go further.  So far I've read three books with Miss Silver, all set during the Second World War.  By my count, there are twenty-four more, and I can easily see myself collecting them all (I already have two more on the TBR stacks).  They may tend toward the cozy side, but Miss Silver is one tough cookie, and those who do evil tend to get what is coming to them. She sees herself as an agent for justice, "which she would certainly have spelt with a capital letter."  But she isn't self-righteous or pious about it, she just gets on with the job at hand.

Cats in books

This is not really a bookish post.  I lost a cat this past weekend.  She was 17 years old, and in the first stages of kidney disease, but she'd just had a check-up and the tests showed that she was stable.  Then Saturday night she started having trouble breathing.  After hours at the emergency vet clinic, they told me it was probably a tumor in her chest, which was confirmed by tests the next day.  Apparently these often develop in older cats, which I never knew.  The tumor she had attached itself to her heart, and there was really nothing to do, except let them end her suffering.  It was so sudden that it has kind of left me in shock, reaching for comfort books (Georgette Heyer, P.G. Wodehouse) and comfort foods (malted milkshakes and chai latte).  My other cat refused to eat for a couple of days, but now she seems less stressed.

On that very long Sunday, waiting for the call about the second tests, I started thinking about cats in books. Making a list of my favorites proved a nice distraction, and later I went trolling through the bookshelves, looking for them.

The first literary cats I met might have been in the Little House books, Black Susan in the Big Woods and then Kitty in the Dakota territory, plus the barn cats in Farmer Boy that Almanzo feeds with warm new milk. These aren't really pets, they are working animals on the farms.  The Ingalls get Kitty after Pa wakes up in the middle of the night with a mouse chewing on his hair, and Susan is the best mouser in the Big Woods.  But the cats also help make their homes cozy, as in the Big Woods:

The sunshine came streaming through the windows into the house, and everything was so neat and pretty  . . .  The pantry door stood wide open, giving the sight and smell of goodies on the shelves, and Black Susan came purring down the stairs from the attic, where she had been taking a nap.

I think Elizabeth Peters has more cats in her books than any author I've read.  In the Amelia series, it begins with the matriarch Bastet, a large brindled Egyptian cat, who bonds with the young Ramses:

[John] followed Ramses' every step and scarcely took his eyes off the boy.  He attended to the needs of Bastet, such as they were; the cat required far less attendance than a human child. (Which is one of the reasons why spinster ladies prefer felines to babies.)  Ramses had not insisted on bringing the cat; he had simply taken it for granted that she would accompany him.  The few occasions on which they had been parted had proved so horrendous for all concerned that I gave in with scarcely a struggle.  (The Mummy Case)

When Bastet dies years later, the family keeps pushing kittens on Ramses, but it takes him a long time to connect with another cat.

There is also the cat-filled mansion of Aunt Kate, in Devil-May-Care, one of my favorite of her books:

       The room was enormous - thirty by fifty feet at the least  . . .  The furniture consisted mainly of chairs and tables; the flat surfaces of both types were covered with objects, many of them cats.
      Henry had never seen so many cats.  Fat cats and lean cats. Short-haired cats and cats that looked like animated mops.  Blue cats, White cats, tabby cats, grey cats. Siamese cats, Persian cats, and cats of no determinate species. Kittens. Cats with long tails, cats with no tails at all.

I bet nobody called Aunt Kate a crazy cat lady!  At least not more than once.

Rumer Godden's Benedictine abbey, in In This House of Brede, has cats as well as nuns.  The young postulant Sister Cecily wanted her convent to have box hedges.  Me, I'd pick mine based on the cats.  There is Wimple, "a Benedictine in her black and white, the white running under her chin, which explained her name."

Wimple too had the nuns on a string, as Sister Priscilla would say.  There was a custom in the community for the nuns, on their way to breakfast after Prime, to stop at the statue of our Lady with the Holy Child in the long cloister, to say three Hail Mary's there.  Wimple was impatient for her breakfast, and she would walk among the kneeling figures, giving them small pushings with her head; one hand after another would come out, not to push her away but to stroke her.  Wimple was perverse; she would come into the refectory through the ever-opening service door and walk through the room to the other, demanding to be let out.  Unlike Grock's, Wimple's miaow was piercing and could, at dinner and supper, interrupt the read, so that Sister Xaviera, who doted on Wimple, would get up and let her out.  In a moment or two the little cat would walk in the service door again.

Philippa Talbot says that in coming to the abbey, she gave up "a cat and a clock and some dear little sins."  The cat is a Siamese called Griffon, and after leaving him in his new home, as she prepares to enter the community, "It was better, Philippa found in the the train, not to let herself think about Griffon."

Kerry Greenwood's mysteries featuring Corinna Chapman are also full of cats.  Corinna herself has three: "Horatio, a tabby and white gentleman with impeccable manners and grooming," and the two in the Mouse Police who keep her bakery rodent-free at night.  Her friend Meroe the witch has the night-black Belladona. When a litter of kittens turns up on the doorstep, their neighbors in the building adopt them all, and the mother as well too. One of the kittens was lost for days and discovered shut into an apartment.  When the door is opened,

       [A] very small, very thin black kitten tottered out, climbed the Professor as if every movement hurt, and nestled in his bosom as though she had been looking for him all her short life.  He cradled her in his beautiful long hands.
       'Hello,' he said to the kitten. She put out a little pink tongue and licked his thumb. Then she closed her eyes and gave a short purr.
       From that point on, of course, the Professor was lost.  He was one of the Chosen Ones.  (Heavenly Pleasures)

And then there is J.K. Rowling, who gives us the evil Mrs Norris, prowling the corridors of Hogwarts at night, just looking for students she can squeal on.  But there is also Crookshanks, Hermione's big ginger cat, on whom she dotes.  He's the only one to sense danger in Scabbers the rat.  But my favorite cat in J.K. Rowling's world is the first one we meet, the tabby cat on the corner of Privet Drive, whom Mr Dursley sees reading a map.  How perfect that Professor McGonagall's Animagus form is a cat, when "This animal form is not chosen by the wizard, but determined by their personality and inner traits."

I actually have a few more fictional cats on my list, but I think I'll stop here, and go sit with my real-life furball for a while, and just be grateful for the wonderful cats who've shared my life, especially my Cassie.

House-sitting with ghosts

Devil-May-Care, Elizabeth Peters

This is one of my favorites among Elizabeth Peters' many books, and I've been wanting to read it again ever since I learned of her death last month.  It is also one of the books on my list for the R.I.P. challenge, where I'm taking on Peril the First.

As the story opens, Henry and Ellie are driving through Virginia to the home of her Aunt Kate, where Ellie will house-sit for a couple of weeks.  Henry, a rising young lawyer in Washington, is thrilled to find that his fiancée, while not yet fully trained to be the wife of a Great Man, has a rich aunt with no children of her own.  He is determined to impress his new-found future aunt, but things don't go quite according to plan.  Ellie waves him good-bye the next morning with a sense of relief, before settling down to enjoy her solitude (by that point, the reader is equally happy to see the back of him).  She spends a peaceful, relaxing rainy day pottering the house.  But that night, on her way upstairs to bed, she encounters a young man:

     . . . a pleasant-looking person, with an attractive smile.  His hair fell in long, wavy locks to his shoulders.  He wore a brown coat with lace at his throat, knee breeches, and white stockings; and, at knee level, a low table with a vase of flowers on it.  The table was the one that normally stood in that part of the hall.  The man was, in a word, transparent.
     As Ellie stood transfixed, he went out - disappeared, vanished, like a light when a lamp is switched off.

His appearance marks the start of a series of increasingly eerie events.  Ellie suspects at first that someone is playing tricks on her, but she is forced to consider that there may be another explanation.  Could there be a connection with an old book that Ellie brought as a present for Kate, a history of the oldest families in the county?  She begins to hear stories, the kind that proud old families try to keep out of the history books.  After she meets her neighbors, Dr. Frank Gold and his son Donald, they join her in trying to figure out what exactly is going on in the house, and who - or what - is behind it.

This is a fun, adventurous story, mixing romance and mystery, with some genuinely creepy moments.  Like all Elizabeth Peters' books, it has some laugh-out-loud moments as well, particularly at the pompous Henry's expense.  Aunt Kate is a great character, outspoken, opinionated and eccentric, given to sudden enthusiasms like Scottish dancing and homeopathic medicine.  She also collects animals, many of them rescues.  Fortunately her house is large enough to accommodate the twelve cats (at least) and six dogs, not to mention a rat named Roger.  And oh that house!  I'd love a chance to house-sit there, ghosts or no.  "The house was originally eighteenth century, but its red brick central core had spread out into innumerable wings."  There is a medieval entry hall complete with refectory table, an 18th-century drawing room with its Aubusson carpet and rosewood piano, a library with three walls and a gallery overflowing with books, a "small cozy parlor in the east wing" with American colonial furniture and framed samplers on the walls.  But most of all I want to move into Kate's workroom, an enormous room cluttered not just with cats, but with craft materials and musical instruments, the walls hung with pictures and posters, "as in an overcrowded and bizarre art gallery," including a map of Middle Earth.  I couldn't live in that kind of chaos, but I'd love to visit.

One of the things that cracks me up about this book is that it is really a "Barbara Michaels" book, disguised as an "Elizabeth Peters" book.  I'm not the first to point this out.  The front cover of my TOR paperback has a quote from Marion Zimmer Bradley: "Barbara Michaels is a wonderful writer, even if she calls herself Elizabeth Peters."  I've always wondered if Barbara Mertz (the author's real name) did that deliberately.  She thought noms de plume were a little silly but accepted the convention.  The most obvious "Michaels" element is the paranormal activity, whatever its source, which occurs in almost all of her books, but rarely if at all in the "Peters" books.  The plot here reminded me very strongly of Barbara Michaels' House of Many Shadows (also a favorite), where a young woman goes to stay at a relative's isolated house in the country (in Pennsylvania rather than Virginia), and ghostly events follow, including an apparition on a staircase.  Aunt Kate reminded me of a younger Mrs. Jackson MacDougal, from Michaels' Ammie, Come Home, as did the romantic pairings here, with a younger couple matching an older.  The book also includes some jabs at Christians, particularly Southern evangelicals, a frequent element in the later Michaels books (and one that makes me uncomfortable).  Religion plays little part in the Peters books, though Amelia Peabody Emerson is a staunch Anglican who attends church regularly, but really I suspect she and her entire family expect to meet Osiris and his judgement in the next life.

But whether this is a "Michaels" or a "Peters" book doesn't matter in the end, it's a great read either way.  I may end up with more of both authors' books on my RIP list.

Elizabeth Peters & Barbara Michaels

Though I knew that Barbara Mertz was in her 80s, and not in the best health, I was still so surprised and dismayed to learn of her death last week.  I never met her in person, though I once had a very kind note in answer to a fan letter.  It is a strange feeling when a beloved author dies.  Mixed in with grief for the individual is a feeling of loss for the characters and worlds that she created.  I was introduced to the books that Barbara Mertz wrote as Elizabeth Peters by one of my college roommates (we are still sharing books, which reminds me her birthday is coming up).  I've been reading her books for almost 25 years now, and I have more of them on my shelves than of any other author except Anthony Trollope and P.G. Wodehouse.

On my friend's recommendation, I started with the Amelia Peabody books.  I was living in Michigan at the time, working at my first job, with a salary that after the austerities of grad school still amazed me, in a town with real bookstores.  Though I had always managed to acquire books, that was when I really started collecting the books that are with me still.  I was on my own, in a new city, with a new career, and her books came at just the right time for me.  (Two years later they came with me to Houston, to another new job in a bigger city with even more bookstores).  The women in her stories are strong, intelligent, active, adventurous, blessed with the gifts of friendship and humor.  In the course of their adventures they usually find love, but that doesn't define them or their stories.  I think Amelia Peabody Emerson is her best-known and probably most popular character, with the long series of books about her adventures in professional and marital partnership with Radcliffe Emerson, the greatest Egyptologist of this or any other age.  I am also a big fan of acerbic Jacqueline Kirby, a librarian turned romance writer turned sleuth.  While I enjoy the books with Vicky Bliss, an American working as a museum curator in Munich, the real fun of that series for me is the master criminal John Smythe and his cornflower-blue eyes, created as an homage to Dorothy Dunnett's great Francis Crawford of Lymond.  And there are many wonderful stand-alone books, written both as Elizabeth Peters and as Barbara Michaels.  I came a little later to the Michaels books, most of them mysteries with a supernatural element.  I slept with the light on for a night or two after finishing Ammie, Come Home for the first time.  As much as I love Ruth and Pat, and enjoy their appearance in later books, I still keep that one for daytime reading. I found another, The Crying Child, so unnerving that I gave my copy away.  I have also read and admired the books that Dr. Mertz wrote on Egypt and Egyptology, under her own name.

In the end, the books remain, a literary legacy, with her many wonderful characters, and those vividly-evoked settings, from tidewater Virginia to the Valley of the Kings, Copenhagen to the Arizona desert.  I wish I drank whiskey, so I could raise a glass of Amelia's favorite to her marvelous creator.  Instead, I'll have a cup of tea, her other favorite beverage, and look forward to many more years of reading Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels.

Archaeology in Arizona

Summer of the Dragon, Elizabeth Peters

I have been a fan of Elizabeth Peters' books for many years now.  I started with her series featuring Victorian archaeologists Amelia and Radcliffe Emerson.  While exploring and excavating in Egypt, the Emersons are drawn into investigating various crimes, often related to the theft of antiquities.  Over the course of the series, which now includes 19 books, I have learned more than a little about ancient Egypt and modern archaeology.  Elizabeth Peters herself has a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago and has written a book on Egyptian history under her own name, Barbara Mertz (Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs).

Summer of the Dragon is set in her familiar field of archaeology, but in a new location: Arizona.  D.J. Abbott, a grad student in anthropology, needs a summer internship so she doesn't have to spend the summer with her loving but crazy parents.  She accepts a vaguely-worded offer from Hank Hunnicutt, a self-made multi-billionaire, famous for pouring money into crackpot ideas like the search for UFOs.  He claims to have made a sensational discovery near his Arizona ranch, and he needs assistance in bringing it to light.  When D.J. arrives as his palatial estate (somewhere around Flagstaff), she discovers a crowd of guests, many with their own crackpot theories (Atlantis, past-life regressions, alien abductions) that they are hoping Hank will fund.  Some are true believers, others are clearly con artists.  Peters has a lot of fun with the crowd, pointing out the absurdities and inconsistencies in their theories. 

At the ranch D.J. also discovers two tall, dark & handsome young men, one Hank's assistant (and an archaeologist in his own right), the other searching for lost gold mines.  One woos her, the other spars with her at every turn.  If you've read enough Elizabeth Peters, it's pretty clear who the hero is going to be.  I was never completely sure about the villain, though, because there is such a cast of suspects.  Whatever Hank has discovered out in the desert, it is making someone nervous.  Then Hank himself disappears.  Has he been kidnapped?  The police don't think so, but D.J. and the saner members of the party head out into the desert to find him - though "sane" doesn't necessarily mean "innocent."

As with the Emerson books, Peters introduces history and archaeology without overwhelming the story. This was a fun, fast Sunday-afternoon read, though I don't think D.J. would make it through an internship with Amelia and Emerson in Egypt.  I also enjoyed the Arizona setting.  Peters clearly loves the austere beauty of the desert, whether in Egypt or America, and there are some almost lyrical descriptions of mountains and canyons, and the effects of light and space.

An Egyptological mystery

The Jackal's Head, Elizabeth Peters

As I've mentioned before, I really enjoy Elizabeth Peters' books, especially the series with Egyptologists Amelia Peabody Emerson and her husband Radcliffe (not that anyone calls him that).  The stories in that series run from the late 1880s up into the 1920s.  When I sat down with The Jackal's Head, I had no idea what it was about, other than that it was set in Egypt.  It was quite a surprise, and a pleasant one, to find it very much like an Amelia story, one set in the late 20th century.  Published in 1968, this book does not feel dated at all, but it does feel like a precursor to the later books, as if Peters took the elements of the story and the characters and put them together in a new way for the first Amelia book, Crocodile on the Sandbank (published in 1975).

As The Jackal's Head opens, Althea (Tommy) Tomlinson arrives in Luxor with Dee Bloch, a 17-year-old girl meeting her businessman father in Egypt.  Tommy grew up in Luxor with her widowed father Jake, an archaeologist on the staff of the Luxor Institute.  When she was 16, Jake lost his position after accusations that he tried to sell a faked antique.  Father and daughter returned to America, and Jake died soon after in a car wreck that might have been suicide.  In the ten years since his death, Tommy has become obsessed with clearing his name.  Then one day, she gets a letter from the Egyptian headman of the workers, now an old man, with a cryptic message that he has information about her father for her.  Soon she is on the hunt not just for evidence to clear her father, but also for a previously-undiscovered tomb, even richer and more important than Tutankhamen's, joined by Jake's former colleagues at the Institute and the Blochs.

Anyone familiar with the Amelia books will recognize in this cast of characters a proto-Emerson (complete with pipe and roar), a proto-Abdullah, and a proto-Cyrus (complete with twang).  Tommy herself is not an Amelia prototype, though there are similarities.  Both are strong, determined characters.  In an extended section, Tommy rescues herself from imprisonment by the villains.  Lacking Amelia's knowledge and resources (especially that famous tool belt), she nevertheless analyzes her position and works her way to a solution.  Like Amelia she also finds herself in love over the course of her adventures, and the relationship that ensues will be a partnership:

"He was paying me an unusual but immense compliment by treating me as a partner, engaged in a job that was as meaningful to me as it was to him.  In that seemingly casual assumption I could dimly see the seeds of something too important to risk."

Amelia expected to be treated as an equal partner, in marriage and in Egyptology.  That is a new idea for Tommy, but it promises a pretty happy ending, and perhaps still an unusual one in 1968.

This was a fun read, not just because of the Emerson echoes, and it reminds me how much I would love to travel to Egypt.  In the meantime, there is an "King Tut" exhibit just opening here in Houston, and I can play Egyptologist there.

Sequels can be murder

Naked Once More, Elizabeth Peters

I was introduced to Elizabeth Peters' books more than 20 years ago, by my college roommate and fellow history major.  I started with the Amelia Peabody series, which I re-read every couple of years (except for the early lisping Ramses books).  From there I branched out to the other series, the Vicky Bliss and the Jacqueline Kirby books, and also to the books she wrote as Barbara Michaels.  Some of the Michaels books still give me the cold grues, all these years later.  The first time I read Ammie, Come Home I had to sleep with the light on, and I still don't read it or House of Many Shadows after dark.

The Elizabeth Peters listserv I belong to is discussing Naked Once More this month, and that led me to read it again for the first time in years.  It's the fourth and last of the Jacqueline Kirby books, which have never been as popular as the Amelia or Vicky books.  I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the character of Jacqueline.  She is imperious, stubborn, self-dramatizing, sarcastic, and often impatient - much like Amelia and Emerson, actually.  On the other hand, she has a wicked sense of humor, she is a reader (and a librarian), she is a loyal friend, and she believes in justice and fair play, which is what gets her involved in solving crimes. 

In the third book of the series, Die for Love, Jacqueline abandons her career as a librarian to become a writer of bodice-ripping historical fiction.  In Naked Once More, she is offered the chance to write a sequel to a blockbuster novel, whose author Kathleen Darcy disappeared seven years ago under mysterious circumstances.  The book, Naked in the Ice, was "a unique blend of fantasy and fact, an adult Lord of the Rings, a literary Clan of the Cave Bear, a Pleistocene Gone With the Wind."  That description makes me want to read it! though I quibble with the idea that The Lord of the Rings isn't "adult" literature.  Once Jacqueline wins the commission, she travels to Kathleen Darcy's home, the small town of Pine Grove in western Pennsylvania.  There she meets Kathleen's family and friends. Diving into her papers and her past, Jacqueline discovers that Kathleen's life was in danger, and she begins investigating who might have wanted her dead or disappeared.  And then she finds herself becoming a target.

Both this book and Die For Love are as much about writing and publishing as they are about solving mysteries, in the same way that we learn about Egyptology in the Amelia books. Naked Once More was published in 1989, and of course the book business has changed quite a bit since then.  Though it may seem a bit dated (people still watch Donahue, and no one has a cell phone), it's still a great read, a twisty mystery with a varied cast of characters and Peters' trademark humor.  There seems to be a consensus among Peters' fans that because the Amelia books were so successful, her publishers only wanted more books in that series, rather than her other series or stand-alone books.  I do enjoy the Amelias, but I'd sure have liked another Jacqueline.