The Donkey-Vous: A Mamur Zapt Mystery

Rating:
Summary: Believable, engaging characters; great setting for a crime
Review: I couldn't disagree more! Pearce continues to be one of the cleverest, funniest mystery writers I've read. Perhaps it helps that I've been to and love Egypt. He captures the bureaucracy beautifully. The Mamur is such a likable person. I look for characterizations and settings first, plot second. But I even think the plot of this one is lively!

Rating:
Summary: Believable, engaging characters; great setting for a crime
Review: I couldn't disagree more! Pearce continues to be one of the cleverest, funniest mystery writers I've read. Perhaps it helps that I've been to and love Egypt. He captures the bureaucracy beautifully. The Mamur is such a likable person. I look for characterizations and settings first, plot second. But I even think the plot of this one is lively!

Rating:
Summary: It's a dry heat--but still a very hot tale.
Review: The locked room mystery, but done opposite. One, then another foreign gentleman vanishes. Kidnapped--each abducted by three or more men. There on the terrace of Shepheard's, the grandest hotel in Colonial Cairo. Another bright, hot afternoon. In view of everybody: pampered guests at high tea, disciplined waiters in attendence, throngs of hawkers below, the bazaar street crowd beyond, and donkey boys at rest near the steps. Yet not one witness.

In 1908, the Sultan of Istanbul's power over the Ottoman Empire has waned and even under the rule of a succession of increasingly independent Khedives Egyptians are restive. French statesmen, triumphant in most of Africa, resort to political maneuver to wriggle a contract from the dominant British who control all the major projects.

Captain Cadwallader Owen, Welsh, is the Mamur Zapt, head of political affairs for the Cairo Police. Because the victims are foreign he has been drawn into the case. Despite not wanting to interfere with his capable police detective friend Mahmoud they clash over the implications that reflect on their own origins. Against a background as momentous as the Aswan Dam the evils inherent in colonialism, racism, feudalism, patronage, and fanaticism entwine around the mystery as a cobra coiled in its basket.

Rating:
Summary: Too much talk, to little action
Review: This is suppose to be a "suspense tale" as the writer calls it but all I read was a bunch of talk, more talk, and even more talk. And they aren't very lively conversations either.