Starred review from January 26, 2015
Pearce’s 18th mystery set in early 20th-century Egypt (after 2013’s The Bride Box) is his best yet, replete with his dry sense of humor. Gareth Owen, the head of the Khedive’s Secret Police, agrees to protect a royal pasha carrying some sensitive documents after the pasha is attacked on the train he’s riding to Khartoum. The assault is followed by the suspicious death of a member of the pasha’s entourage, who drowns in the Nile. Owen accompanies the pasha, who may not be exactly what he purports to be, on his return train trip to Egypt, but the travelers are stymied by a severe sandstorm that strands them in the middle of nowhere. The investigator is aided by two unlikely, but engaging, younger assistants: Jamie Nicholson, a railway official’s son, and Aisha al-Jawad, a government lawyer’s feisty daughter. This variation on the snowbound train full of suspicious characters is nicely done, and Pearce is adept at subtly injecting the English-Egyptian tensions of the time.
January 1, 2015
1913. The Mamur Zapt escorts a nervous pasha home from a small town in the Sudan, where life is as predictably unpredictable as it is in Egypt.Pasha Hilmi is convinced that someone has it in for him. First someone tried to filch the briefcase he's carrying, filled with sensitive trade documents, and then someone pushed his man Sayyid into the river, drowning him, perhaps in revenge, perhaps mistaking him for the Pasha. Nicholson, a senior administrator of Egyptian Railways, offers the Pasha, accompanied by the Mamur Zapt-Gareth Cadwallader Owen, the head of the Khedive's Secret Police-the use of the Royal Coach back to the presumed safety of Cairo. Also along for the ride are Nicholson's schoolboy son, Jamie; Parquet diplomatic dogsbody Yasin al-Jawad and his high-toned daughter, Aisha, and the usual retinue of servants and flunkies. The trip grinds to a premature halt when the train gets stuck in a sandstorm. The passengers are rescued in good time, but the briefcase is stolen in the confusion, laying the groundwork for the far more leisurely and characteristic second half of the story, in which the Mamur Zapt uses every resource available to find out not who stole the briefcase-that's pretty obvious-but who hired the thieves and why. A curiosity among Owen's 17 decorous period cases (The Bride Box, 2013, etc.): half high-risk adventure, half low-impact sleuthing, with the Mamur Zapt overshadowed by his hireling's investment-minded wife, the Pasha's sheltered but charming lady, and the alarmingly precocious Aisha.
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February 1, 2015
Pearce's latest is set in Egypt in 1913, when the British colonizers still ruled, although with less and less popularity among Egyptians and their neighbor, Sudan. When a man is fished from the Nile in Sudan, a visiting pasha from the royal household is sure the man was murdered and that the pasha himself was the target. The head of the secret police, the Mamur Zapt, agrees to accompany the pasha back to Cairo to safeguard him. The train is stranded in the desert, leaving the pasha vulnerable, but matters are resolved safely. The scare, however, prompts the Mamur Zapt to gear up his investigation, and he uncovers a dangerous plot that could have immense political repercussions. Pearce is a master at evoking the political, social, religious, and commercial contexts of this tumultuous period in Egypt's history, creating an almost tangible feeling of the heat, noise, culture, and political undercurrents. At the same time, his story is also charming, gentle, and humorous. An excellent book in an outstanding series that belongs in all good mystery collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)