The Cairo Diary [Hardcover]

Maxim Chattam (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2007

British-occupied Cairo, 1928: Several young children have disappeared and were then found, horribly mutilated, in the tombs just outside the city. Panic is spreading among the locals after a cloaked giant is sighted. Has a ghoul from One Thousand and One Nights been brought to life? British inspector Jeremy Matheson follows the trail of the monster, which takes him into the depths of underground Cairo, as well as deep into his own tortured past.
            Mont-Saint-Michel, 2005: Marion has taken refuge in the wind-swept and remote monastery located on a spit of land on the west coast of France. In the wake of a scandal, caused by her own revelations, that is now reverberating through the French capital, she has been spirited away from Paris and brought here by the French Secret Service for her own protection. When she finds a diary dating from 1928 in the monastery library, penned by Jeremy Matheson and hidden inside the jacket of an Edgar Allan Poe book, she is inexorably pulled into the past as she follows his investigation. Soon she feels she is being watched, and taunting notes and riddles urge her to give back what is not hers. Could one of the brothers or sisters at the monastery be behind this? And who is the old man Marion befriends?
            The two stories intertwine and culminate in an absolutely baffling climax in this cinematic bestselling thriller from France. Meticulously researched and fast-paced, The Cairo Diary is a stunning mystery.
 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A bestseller in France, this mystery from Chattam (The Soul of Evil) is unlikely to repeat that success in the U.S. After stumbling across a political coverup, Marion, a clerical employee at a Paris morgue, takes refuge in remote Mont-Saint-Michel. There, while inventorying some books, Marion discovers bound within the covers of Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the diary of an English detective, Jeremy Matheson, describing his probe into a series of sadistic child murders in 1928 Cairo. Marion becomes obsessed with the diary and in finding the solution to the old case. Strangely, the third-person diary selections include the thoughts of characters who could not have conveyed them to Matheson. This oddity will raise the suspicions of astute readers, who will be less than shocked by the twist ending. In that subgenre featuring a modern character who seeks the truth about a past crime through study of a secret document, this effort comes up short.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

This richly atmospheric crime novel tells two stories in parallel. The first concerns Marion, a secretary in the Paris morgue, who inadvertently exposes a scandal that may reach the highest levels of government. The French secret service spirits her off to a safe house near the fabled monastery of Mont St. Michel for her own safety. The second plot element concerns the diary of an English detective in Cairo in 1928. In a time when Egyptian nationalism is on the rise, Detective Jeremy Matheson is investigating the unspeakably brutal murders of four children in the seething Egyptian capital. The crimes are so brutal that many in Cairo fear that a ghul, a ghoul from Arabic legend, is stalking the city. Marion discovers the diary in the monastery library and begins to read it as a distraction from her own fears, but as she reads, she discovers that Jeremy's investigation has become her obsession. Chatta effectively challenges the reader's ability to discern the nature of truth in this beguiling mix of contemporary and historical mystery. Thomas Gaughan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; 1st edition (June 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312360991
• ISBN-13: 978-0312360993
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,153,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Weaves a pretty tangled web, June 19, 2008

By 

Pamela K. Gitta "Copywriter" (Northern IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cairo Diary (Hardcover)

I love Paul Auster.

I mention that so you'll see where I'm coming from when I say that "The Cairo Diary" is the weirdest book I've ever read.

I spent the entire story feeling as if it were being told to me from a parallel universe where everything is off by a fraction of a kilter. Just enough to make you squirm. Characters' actions don't follow their thoughts, and dialogue flies in from somewhere on the far side of M1. Threats never get threatening enough to cause you a moment's true concern. Sinister people and equally sinister storms hover nearby, only to vanish as quickly as they appeared and leave no trace. Our heroine is supposedly in mortal danger, yet her fears come and go in the space of two lines.

These oddities are couched in prose that will also make you say, "huh"? If I could get a copy of this book in French, I'm just proficient enough to stumble around and see if those faults are the author's or the translator's. Without reading both versions, it's hard to say who is to blame for descriptions like this (though I have my ideas.): "The sea clashed its undulating cymbals, bringing forth a tremolo of foam that spurted onto the towers, soiling the stone with this choleric ejaculation."

That comes right after a line ascribing suicidal tendencies to a pair of window shutters.

If Chattam knows Poe, he probably also knows another American gothic master: William Faulkner. I sense a yearning for Mr. Faulkner in these pages, but Detective Matheson is no Benjy Compson, and the final twist is more like a half-thought-out kink.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Suberb mystery, June 22, 2007

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cairo Diary (Hardcover)

In 2005 the French DST (secret police) move Marian from Paris to Mont-Saint-Michel on the west coast in order to keep her safe. To somewhat ease the ennui, she visits the library at Avranches. There she finds a journal written by Cairo Police Detective Jeremy Matheson in 1928.

Cairo 1928: Several young children vanished in thin air; they were later found dead at the tombs; all were horrifically mutilated. The head investigator Egyptian Inspector Azim el-Dayim believes the killer is a ghoul, a mythical inhuman monster. British expatriate Jeremy believes the wealthy husband of his former lover is the culprit. As the city panics over this giant serial killer, Marian believes the diary is real and that someone objects to her having it; she receives threatening notes to return what is not hers as she tries to solve the mystery of an almost eight decade old Egyptian serial killer.

Though Marian is looking back via the diary, readers will feel the atmosphere filled with tension of 1928 Cairo when Egypt was an English protectorate. The story line moves effortlessly between the two eras as Marian who has caused some sort of highest level scandal in Paris finds she is caught up in the intrigue of the historical murder investigation and pondering who in the present wants her to return what she assumes is the diary. With a slick touch of having the diary inside a Poe tale, mystery fans will appreciate THE CAIRO DIARY as the audience like the heroine will ponder the maxim truth is in the eye of the beholder as "what is truth at the end of the day" or tale.

Harriet Klausner

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great idea poorly executed, September 19, 2008

By 

Expat (Boulder, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cairo Diary (Hardcover)

Initially I found this book fascinating and intriguing and I really wanted to get to grips with both mysteries contained in the story, but in the end I gave up on reading it, skipped to the end and then returned it to the library. Why? Because reading it drove me crazy! I don't know if it was the original french style or the translation but the numerous extremely short paragraphs intermingled with quite long and detailed descriptions made the novel very disjointed and jerky and impossible to really get involved with the story. I ended up just wishing the whole thing would come to an end so I could stop getting a headache from the constantly changing rhythmn of the text.

Having said that, the mystery is a good one, the character of Marion is sympathetic and the descriptions of 1920s Egypt are fascinating.