The Curse of the Pharaohs

The Curse of the Pharaohs by Elizabeth Peters
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I LOVED this. Elizabeth Peters is SO good. My Crimes & Thrillers group read the first in the series some time ago and enjoyed it so much that, now we have separated ourselves from the library which spawned the group and are now obliged to suggest our own titles, I thought we would probably enjoy reading the second one Although I’m only coming to this series (begun in the 1980s) now (2016), the writing is timeless.
As cosies go, Amelia Peabody’s is an not just an exceptional narrative voice, it’s seminal. I was laughing out loud at the antics her infant son Ramses gets up to as the novel begins. I never quite managed to work out how old he is when he unearths the bone from the compost heap (I’m guessing older than two but not yet three, at which point he has begun to write—not just print—but WRITE).
‘I fink,’ he said, ‘it is a femuw. A femuw of a winocewos.’
‘There are no rhinoceroses in England,’ I pointed out.
‘A a-stinct winocewos,’ said Ramses.
Her eye for detail is as is as extraordinary as her eye for humour.
A murder ensues. Motives abound. At some point Peters claims that, unlike in reality, writers of sensational detective fiction can suit the facts to how they themselves would like them to be. If I were writing this book, I would have a very different murderer—even though the culprit turned out to be exactly who I wanted them to be.
Fantastic stuff. A pity then that libraries seem to rid themselves of older books in order to accommodate new ones, especially when said books are clearly classics.
But that’s just my own humble opinion…what do you think? Do let me know!

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