The Daughter of Dead Kings, by Elizabeth Peters, $25.95. Fourteen years have passed since Vicky Bliss, a lanky, beautiful Munich museum curator, last chased after villains and missing antiquities, sometimes aided, frequently bedded and usually perplexed by the master art thief known by the alias “Sir John Smythe.”
Time may take its toll on the pyramids in the Egypt’s Valley of the Kings where this purported final adventure unfolds, but Vicky is still in her early 30s even though clocks and calendars have moved forward.
It’s what fellow mystery writer Margaret Maron calls the “current now” and it requires only the simplest suspension of disbelief to accept. Peters’ other major series, featuring Egyptologist Amelia Peabody Emerson, does move in real time, which allows for an interesting means of connecting the two series when — well, that would be telling.
When “The Daughter of Dead Kings” opens, John claims to be retired, but when a man reported to be a dashing Englishman is accused of the most audacious crime of the century, the theft of King Tut’s mummified remains, the evidence all points to John.
He’s immediately off to Egypt to prove his innocence by nabbing the real thief. Vicky, wanting to believe him, follows, accompanied by her boss, Herr Doktor Anton K. Schmidt, a portly gourmand with a taste for country music who was once a member of the anti-Nazi White Rose — remember what we said about the “current now?”
The result is a gay frolic that will leave readers demanding that Peters relent and allow the series to go on. After all, in the end, Vicky does leave a door open to that possibility.
White Nights, by Ann Cleeves, $24.95. The author, who began writing more than 20 years ago with a series of bird-watching mysteries, has really come into her own with her Jimmy Perez series, the first of which, “Raven Black,” won the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger award for best mystery novel of the year in England.
This second installment doesn’t disappoint: Once again, Cleeves perfectly captures the rhythms of life on a small Shetland island, made all the more atmospheric by the long midsummer nights when the sun never sets and birds sing at midnight.
Jimmy, who claims to be the descendant of a shipwrecked Spaniard from the Armada, has begun a tentative relationship with artist and single mother Fran Hunter, and the book opens with an exhibition of her paintings and those of another island artist, Bella Sinclair.
The proceedings are disrupted when a strange man dressed in black falls to his knees before one painting and begins sobbing inconsolably. When Jimmy tries to comfort him, it turns out the man has amnesia and remembers nothing before the moment he saw the painting. Further, he turns up later that long night hanged to death in a villager’s shed, his face covered by an eerie clown mask.
It falls to Jimmy, of course, to sort matters out and to sift through closely held secrets to find out who the man is and why he was murdered, for of course it turns out that he was. The characters and their relationships are all splendidly drawn, and Jimmy Perez, an intuitive detective who solves his cases by quietly absorbing all the information available to him, continues to impress us. We look forward to the remaining two books in this projected quartet.
Folly du Jour, by Barbara Cleverly, $24.95. Commander Joe Sandilands is off to Paris for an Interpol conference in 1927 when he’s summoned to the jail cell of his old mentor and fellow Englishman, Sir George Jardine, who has been unjustly charged with murder.
Joe’s mission to clear his friend takes him to the glittering Folies Bergere, where the crime was committed, and in and out of the bureaucracy of the corrupt Parisian justice system. Among those who lend him a hand are Josephine Baker, who is taking Paris by storm, and the pipe-smoking journalist Georges Simenon.
The magic of this series when it first appeared was its exotic colonial Indian setting, but Sandilands is a man of such intelligence and authority that the series has flourished even after his return to England and his forays into France.
Cleverly’s crisp prose and solid cast of supporting characters, including Francine, the young usherette who becomes Joe’s guide through the world of Parisian music halls, make the book a delight to read.
Tom and Enid Schantz write a regular column on new mysteries.
