The subtitle is A Lisa Donahue Mystery and Lisa is the heroine and absolute centre of this novel. She is a newly hired and untenured museum curator in Boston in the fairly obscure Boston University Museum of Archaeology and History and, as the book opens, she has taken an Egyptian mummy to be X rayed in a local Veterinary clinic. The story develops as the vicissitudes of the mummy and other museum objects intersperse with human crises like the murder of a colleague in the museum and the personal problems of Lisa as a single parent of a small child.
The author explains that she has based the adventures of the mummy on her research
for a serious book called The Virtual Mummy (2003). I enjoyed the elaborate
details of the treatment of such artefacts and of the complexities of running
a museum. The characters of Lisa and her daughter are sympathetically drawn
and the rest of the staff and the people around Lisa are also well described.
The mystery becomes more and more tangled as the book progresses and we follow
Lisa=s thought processes as she attempts to unravel it. A good first detective
story appealing to those interested in Ancient Egypt and in administration of
museums. As Dick Francis proved in his books people do enjoy learning the details,
however arcane, of a particular job
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Jennifer S. Palmer
As already stated this is Sarah Wisseman’s first book in the detective genre.
I read a paperback copy but this book is also available as an ebook.