Wednesday, April 28, 2021

The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters, 352 pages

 Having excavated in many of the most important sites in Egypt, Amelia, her distinguished and eminently desirable husband, Emerson, and their dauntingly precocious son, Ramses, now hope to go where no archaeologist has gone before: the ruins of the ancient city of Napata in the heart of the Sudan. Alas, their dreams of untouched temples and royal pyramids are dashed - first by the British Empire, which is waging a cursedly inconvenient war in the region, and then by a noble-minded British subject with a ludicrous request: Find the explorer, Willoughby Forth.


Fourteen years earlier, Forth led his lovely young bride into the arid Nubian desert and was never heard from again. Now his grandfather, Viscount Blacktower, has received a mysterious message - and a map - from his long-lost heir. Emerson is quite sure that the note scrawled on a bit of papyrus is the work of an impudent forger. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the map, which Forth fervently believed would lead to a secret oasis - not to mention a lost race bedecked in gold.

Though common sense discouraged Amelia & Co. from following in Forth's ill-fated footsteps, forces both insidious and unknown conspire to draw them into uncharted desert waste. And soon, the gallant Emerson-Peabodys, though no strangers to peril, find themselves in the most dangerous and extraordinary predicament of their lives.



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