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Book Review of The Curse of the Pharaohs (Amelia Peabody, Bk 2)

The Curse of the Pharaohs (Amelia Peabody, Bk 2)
althea avatar reviewed on + 774 more book reviews


The second in Elizabeth Peters' Egyptian mystery series. I read the first
one, The Crocodile on the Sandbank, in December, and while it wasn't my
favorite book ever, I liked it well enough to pick up the next one.
While I was disappointed by the first one ending in having Amelia, the
smart, independent Victorian heroine married and knocked up, I was
DELIGHTED that this one opens with her being rather overwhelmed and
unenthused by motherhood, not fitting into Ladies' Society at all, and
ready to leave the kid with someone else for an extended period and go
back to archaeology. Which, with her husband, she does.
Hired by a wealthy widow whose Egyptologist husband is rumored to have
been done in by a sinister ancient curse, Amelia's husband expects to
finish a momentuous excavation - but when more violence and disappearances
occur, it's time for more detective work than archaeology.
Peters is an Egyptologist herself, and it really shows in these books,
which is a big plus. However, the mysteries themselves, I'm finding, are
just a little bit too typical of the genre.