Heart of the Nile

February 15, 2023
Victorian sleuths unwrap confounding clues in a mummy murder. In 1893, British Museum volunteer Phillip Addison can barely contain his excitement when he's asked to catalog a recently acquired female mummy. When the amateur Egyptologist examines his specimen, he makes an amazing discovery, which he rushes off to show the "one person he could trust." Cut to the well-appointed offices of investigators Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, where Elizabeth Addison tearfully recounts the details surrounding her husband's disappearance. After the two men visit the museum's mummy vault, their meeting with bookish Liam Grant, one of Barker's regular informants, fleshes out some significant details. Grant is the person Addison trusted--the missing man gave him an apparently priceless ruby for safekeeping. Barker agrees to take the jewel, later identified as the Heart of the Nile, off Grant's hands. Shortly thereafter, Addison is found floating in the Thames, stabbed to death. The deadly game is afoot, amiably narrated by junior partner Llewelyn, who plays Archie Goodwin to Barker's more formal Nero Wolfe. Barker & Llewelyn's 14th recorded case combines another authoritative tour of Victoriana with a deep dive into Egyptian lore and history, with remarkable tidbits woven seamlessly into the novel's tapestry, including references or visits to Scotland Yard, the Tower of London, and Charing Cross Road and passing allusions to Dickens, Franz Liszt, and H. Rider Haggard's popular novel Cleopatra.Barker even has his own version of the Baker Street Irregulars, called the Millwall Boys. An audacious shooting on the street underscores the urgent need to solve this baffling crime. An engaging immersion in a colorful era, plus a mystery!

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Starred review from February 13, 2023
In Thomas’s superlative 14th mystery featuring Victorian inquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn (after 2022’s Fierce Poison), grammar school teacher Phillip Addison has volunteered to work at night to help the British Museum catalog its enormous collection of Egyptian mummies. In the process, Addison hopes to further his own research and devise a formula to determine a mummy’s original weight. But when he looks at a female mummy that has languished for years unexamined, he discovers it’s surprisingly heavy—and that its chest contains a giant heart-shaped ruby. Addison hurries to inform his superior, Clive Hennings, of the treasure, but disappears after doing so. Addison’s wife asks Barker and Llewelyn to find him, a task complicated when Hennings shares that the mummy containing the jewel may be Cleopatra herself. The missing person case becomes a homicide inquiry when someone linked to the mummy is found floating in the Thames, the victim of a fatal stabbing. The author does a terrific job playing a variation on the classic brilliant sleuth and capable sidekick duo. Thomas is on a roll. Agent: Maria Carvainis, Maria Carvainis Agency.

Starred review from March 1, 2023
December 1893. Phillip Addison, a volunteer in the British Museum's Egyptology Department, is working alone one evening when he makes a startling discovery: the mummy he is examining is a female preserved like a royal personage, with a huge, heart-shaped ruby in her chest cavity. Perhaps, he thinks, this mummy might even be Cleopatra! Deciding to take this amazing news to his boss--despite it being midnight--Phillip sets off, but he never makes it to his destination. The next day his distraught wife visits private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, begging them to find her missing husband. The duo agrees to take the case, which will take the pair from the Houses of Parliament to the opium dens of London's shadiest neighborhoods to deadly confrontations with a Chinese Triad. Along the way, they also tangle with powerful politicos and the power brokers at the museum, all of whom have much to hide. Of course, despite the formidable obstacles in their path, Barker and Llewelyn solve the case in their inimitable style, displaying both finely honed intuition and superb sleuthing to go with plenty of irreverent banter in the manner of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. As always, the proceedings are awash with the kind of gaslit London ambience that is guaranteed to please devotees of British historical mysteries.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.