Amelia Peabody Mysteries #18: The Serpent on the Crown by Elizabeth Peters

Read: 20 January, 2012

Every good detective needs a special trait. Adrian Monk has OCD, Nero Wolfe is overweight, Gilbert Cunningham takes place in Medieval Scotland... Peters' Amelia Peabody is an Egyptologist working in the late 19th - early 20th century.

I've long been something of an amateur Egyptology aficionado (and, in fact, was set on a career in the field for years before the insecurity of puberty put me off any "hard" careers), so I was quite excited to give this mystery series a try. Also, I like to start series at the beginning, but I picked this but up at a sale so I thought I'd give it a try anyway.

In this adventure, a widow and well-known author presents Peabody&co with a "cursed" statuette and claims that a mysterious black afrit killed her husband and is coming after her.

The mystery was fairly blah. The detectives do very little detecting; instead, they spend 2/3 of the novel having things happen to them, and then the culprits confess everything. In the final chapter, it's revealed that Peabody had everything figured out much earlier, but she gave no indication of this at the time.

And, frankly, it's not like the detectives didn't have the chance to do some real detecting - they just sucked at it. For example, two of Peabody's party spend days trying to track down fugitives before they even think of the possibility that the fugitives might not be using their real names!

The writing  form was also rather confusing. Some sections were titled "From Manuscript H," but no indication was given as to what this might refer to. I suppose it's possible that this was established in an earlier book, but it was rather weird, especially since there were no other section titles. Peters also made the odd choice of switching back and forth between first person and third, without any real reason for the choice.

All in all, I'd say that this is a fine detective story for a poolside read, but it's not worth seeking out.

Cairo by G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker

Read: 10 July, 2008

This is the first actual full-length graphic novel I've ever read, so I don't have all that much to compare it to. That being said, I enjoyed it immensely. It's a short read. I went through it in about five hours while at work, so I had a whole lot of distractions.

I loved the way mythology was used in the story. The result was an urban fantasy injected with just enough realism to make it all seem possible. The use of Arabic in the story was also well done - just enough to give the story an exotic flavour while not enough to confuse a non-Arabic speaking reader.

The illustrations are beautiful, both realistic and stylized with just enough shadow to give it a gritty feel. There were a few chronological errors (in one part, for example, a character is wearing glasses, and then taking his glasses out of his pocket and putting them on), but these are few and truly unimportant in the face of the work as a whole.

The characters themselves were fairly two-dimensional (the wide-eyed blonde American who wants to change the world, the censored journalist, the Israeli special ops soldier, the American teen who wants to do a suicide bombing in the hopes that it would teach all the kids who teased him in High School a lesson, etc.), but I do understand that it's probably unavoidable in this sort of medium where the space available in which to tell the story is so limited. Even so, strong writing made these stock characters pop and made me hold my breath hoping that they would all come out all right.

In conclusion, I think this is a great book, perfect for anyone interested in world mythology or the middle east.