The Bride Box

by Michael Pearce

Overview

Cairo, 1912. The Pasha receives an unexpected gift: a traditional Bride Box. When opened, however, the box contains an unwelcome jolt from the past . . . At the same time, a little girl is discovered riding under a train from Luxor - and the Mamur Zapt, Head of the Khedive's Secret Police, is called in to investigate.

He soon finds himself confronting a political storm as the end of British rule approaches and his investigations uncover a tangled web of family loyalties and betrayals, with its roots in a slave trade long supposed to have been stamped out in Egypt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727883032
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Series:	A Mamur Zapt Mystery , #17
Edition description:	First World Publication
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Michael Pearce grew up in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He returned there later to teach and retains a human rights interest in the area. He now lives in south-west London and is the author of the highly-acclaimed Mamur Zapt historical mystery series as well as the Seymour of Special Branch police procedural series.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a deftly plotted, cleverly written, highly entertaining mystery, but it’s the gentle humor and the warmth of the characters that earns it two thumbs decisively up."

Booklist Starred Review

"This is a deftly plotted, cleverly written, highly entertaining mystery, but it’s the gentle humor and the warmth of the characters that earns it two thumbs decisively up."

Booklist Starred Review

This is a deftly plotted, cleverly written, highly entertaining mystery, but it’s the gentle humor and the warmth of the characters that earns it two thumbs decisively up.
Booklist  Starred Review of The Bride Box

“As always in this comically understated series, both crime and punishment are consistently upstaged by a lovingly detailed portrait of Egypt during the Great War. The result is a bit like a police procedural reimagined by Douglas Adams.”
Kirkus Reviews on The Bride Box

From the Publisher

One young woman lost and another found are the keys to the Mamur Zapt's latest adventure in 1913 Egypt. A bride box serves as an Egyptian woman's hope chest. The brightly decorated box normally contains her trousseau, the clothing and articles she's collected in anticipation of her wedding day. What it doesn't normally contain is the bride. So it's distressing to find a bride box addressed to Pasha Ali Maher that doubles as a coffin for the body of Soraya, a basket weaver's daughter whose aspirations toward a marriage above her station--perhaps with the Pasha's slow-witted son Karim, perhaps with another member of his household--were cruelly ended by her strangulation. Luckily, Soraya's sister Leila, whose father, Mustapha, sold her to the Sudanese slaver Abdulla Sardawi, has run away from her new owner and landed in the household of Gareth Cadwallader Owen, the Mamur Zapt who heads the Khedive's secret police. But there's not much the little girl can reveal about her sister's fate, and both the Pasha and his lady suavely maintain that it has nothing to do with them. Mobilizing his usual resources--his old friend parquet prosecutor Mahmoud el Zaki and Georgiades, a Greek investigator with a positive genius for drawing petty bureaucrats into imprudent confidences--Owen connects Soraya's death to an ominous smuggling ring and a pair of seriously dysfunctional families. As always in this comically understated series (The Mark of the Pasha, 2008, etc.), both crime and punishment are consistently upstaged by a lovingly detailed portrait of Egypt during the Great War. The result is a bit like a police procedural reimagined by Douglas Adams.

Kirkus Reviews

As always in this comically understated series, both crime and punishment are consistently upstaged by a lovingly detailed portrait of Egypt during the Great War. The result is a bit like a police procedural reimagined by Douglas Adams.

Kirkus Reviews