From Publishers Weekly
As head of the British secret police in Cairo in 1908, Captain Cadwallader Owen is called the Mamur Zapt. In his fourth appearance (after The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous ), Owen receives complaints from a spate of English visitors and Egyptians that they are being followed; then a Customs Department official is shot at. Owen is reluctant to mount a full-scale investigation, however, because of current political unrest: the previous government has recently fallen and the Khedive, Egypt's hereditary ruler, has yet to name a new cabinet. After entertaining a man named Roper who has come to look at old emerald mines as a possible investment, Owen is faced with the death of two students killed when a bomb explodes in a cafe. While still uncertain whether the bombing and the shootings are political or personal, Owen learns of another bombing outside Hamada near the mines Roper is inspecting. Only by traveling to the edge of the desert can Owen unravel the forces and motivations behind the killings. Pearce deftly captures the intertwined political, cultural and religious tensions of his colorful locale and turbulent period.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
Against the background of the hereditary Khedive's dithering over the choice of a new Prime Minister, a wave of (mostly ineffectual) attacks on civil servants--just maybe acts of low-level terrorism- -leads David Cadwallader Owen, the Mamur Zapt of colonial Cairo, to investigate Ali Osman Pasha, a beating victim who turns out to be a candidate for the PM post. Then the attacks turn serious with a bombing in a downtown caf‚ that has links both to a years-long series of bombs carried by university students and to up-to-the-minute slave rings and gunrunners working near, yes, Ali Osman's estate in Lower Egypt. Along the way to his usual drolly underplayed ending, Owen will develop a surprising friendship with a thieving gypsy girl and send his old ministerial friend Mahmoud on a spectacularly successful undercover mission as a law student. Pearce's last few plots (The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous, etc.) have wound his sly, gentle satire more tightly than ever. The most satisfying entry yet in this attractive series. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
