The Serpent on the Crown, by Elizabeth Peters

Retrieved from: someone else's library
(0060591781), 2005
Suggested by: The List
My Ratings: 10 Merit, 9 Interest, 7 Fun

Amelia Peabody returns. It's 1922. The elder Emersons, while not slowing down, are beginning to show their age--they are, after all, well into their 60s, possibly even 70+. The focus is starting to shift more toward the younger generation(s), although Amelia still rules the roost in her (usually) velvet-fisted way.

Some of the elements in this book is reminiscent of one or two of the early books in the series. There is a dramatic and colorful (and evil?) woman, her suspicious-looking stepchildren, a "cursed" statuette of mysterious origins, afrits flitting about in darkness, a murder, a theft, and new scholars on the archaeology scene. The frame is being set for the next book in which Howard Carter--an old friend of the Emersons--begins his search for his fame-claiming tomb find the following year.

Emerson performs a less-than-successful exorcism to rid the statue of its curse. Amelia gets shot. Ramses and David travel to Cairo on the trail of the stepchildren (who are adults, by the way), one of whom has tried to seduce Ramses--of course--the other of whom is bipolar. [That character's behavior and description are sure to bring Peters lots of cranky mail.]

And Sethos is ensconced in the family, providing them with a lot of discomfort, which is amusing, although I liked him better as a distant scoundrel.

Good. Not Peters' best, but as fun as usual.