An entertaining whodunit set in a richly textured panorama of the pharaonic world.
An ancient Egyptian sleuth investigates murder and, worse, tomb robbery in this colorful period mystery.
It’s 1343 B.C.E., and Egyptian diplomat Amen-hotep, aka Lord Hani, gets the delicate assignment from his boss, Ptah-Mes, and the vizier, Aper-el himself, to investigate a series of robberies of noblemen’s tombs in his hometown of Waset. The robberies are rumored to involve a Mitannian foreigner with diplomatic immunity. These are heinous crimes warranting impalement, since the theft of the tombs’ foodstuffs, exquisite jewelry, and luxurious furniture has left the victims with nothing to eat, wear, or sit on in the afterlife. Complicating the case are the victims’ sketchy religious politics: They were all, like Hani, skeptics of King Akhenaten’s overthrow of Egypt’s polytheistic pantheon and establishment of the monotheistic worship of the sun god Aten. Further complicating matters are an outbreak of plague and the intrusions of the brutal police chief Mahu, an enemy of Hani’s who keeps showing up with his retinue of thugs and his snarling attack-baboon to interfere with the probe. Helping out Hani are his dwarf scribe and son-in-law, Maya, who wants to work the case into an adventure story; his jovial dad, Mery-ra; his good-hearted, ne’er-do-well brother, Pipi; and his teenage daughter, Neferet, an apprentice physician at the king’s harem who handles the investigation’s toxicology. (She IDs one poison by mixing it with honey and feeding it to ants.) Amid epic voyages up and down the Nile, Hani unearths hidden murders and pursues a tangle of leads that could implicate the tomb artists, claimants for the Mitannian throne, renegade priests of the old gods, the Egyptian army, or the king’s father-in-law. But before he can unravel the knot, another untimely death ends his official backing and exposes him to dangerous retaliation.
In this latest installment of her Lord Hani series, Holmes, an archaeologist, embroiders a detailed, atmospheric portrait of ancient Egyptian civilization, mores, and high fashion—perfumed wax cones affixed to one’s wig are de rigueur at dinner parties—embedded in a warm, naturalistic depiction of Hani’s life with his wife, Nub-nefer, and family. There’s plenty of exotic pageantry in the novel: “Hani thought of Nub-nefer marching along, singing hymns and shaking her sistrum rhythmically, her face alight with fervor…his brother-in-law, Amen-em-hut, in his starred leopard skin and jeweled sporran, proudly bearing the ram-headed standard of the god as the glittering procession passed from the Great Southern Temple back to the Ipet-isut”—but humble domestic scenes are just as vivid. (“Nub-nefer was standing with her hands on her hips and her skirts tucked up while two naked servants carved the bloody carcass, packed it in salt, and prepared to hang strips on lines for smoking. The reek of blood and offal was horrific.”) Holmes renders this seemingly archaic society with subtlety and realism, rendering characters’ psychologies with sharp-eyed nuance. (Ptah-mes, a cool ironist who edges into depression, is especially magnetic.) Her deft prose skillfully conveys the Egyptian worldview—“How will the murderer keep a straight face at the Weighing of Hearts when he has to say, ‘I have not sinned in the Place of Truth; I have not caused tears; I have not killed; I haven’t taken milk from the mouths of children?’...He’s damned for sure, whoever he is”—while infusing it with noirish corruption and menace. (“I hear you have nice horses, Ptah-mes. Maybe we’ll have to slit them open to see if Talpu-sharri is hiding inside.”) The result is a captivating mix of old-fashioned lore and modern suspense.
An entertaining whodunit set in a richly textured panorama of the pharaonic world.Pub Date: July 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73498-685-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N.L. Holmes
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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