Customer Reviews

The Right Hand of Amon

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have long been interested in all things ancient Egyptian, but have not often read any novels with this as a background. The reason for this is the few I have read have been mostly very poorly written with unbelievable storyline's and little real factual content. This book is everything the others are not - an excellent story combined with a background that actually is believable. You can as good as feel the hot breeze on your face comming in from the desert, taste the cool water from the Nile, and so on, and so on...in short if you want a good story combined with a factual background, get it!

Lieutenant Bak is crossing the Nile when he discovers the body of a man in the river. The knife down his throat proved he was murdered. But who was he and why was he killed? Meanwhile, the god Amon is traveling up the river to meet with a tribal king bringing his son to be healed. Bak would like to lead his mean in guarding the god on his journey, but first he must solve this crime.

I must admit to really being conflicted on this book. There were so many mentions of previous crimes that Bak had solved, I was sure I was jumping in in the middle of the series. Yet everywhere I've looked has led me to believe this is the first book. It started out very slowly, and I was tempted to stop a time or two. But I pressed on, and it got better as it went along. I think part of my problem getting into the book was the strange character and place names. Fortunately, there was a cast of characters and area map at the beginning I used for the first half of the novel to keep all those strange names straight. By the end, I had come to like Bak and was drawn into his quest of find the killer.

I'm being generous and giving this four starts because I did enjoy the second half of the book, and I'll give the author another try. Hopefully, later books in the series start stronger and are more enjoyable over all.

Haney does one thing really really well in "The Right Hand of Amon" -- the descriptions of everyday life as it may have been lived near the end of the 18th dynasty. Perhaps if one has read the series from the beginning, the characters would feel fuller, richer, more like people. However the sign of a great book is to make a newcomer to a series feel for the characters regardless of which book in a series is read first. I didn't feel much of anything for any of the characters. Likewis it seemed that the mystery was solved haphazardly with little evidence and more luck than anything and a satisfying conclusion came with a whimper.

I really wanted to like this book because I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Peters and Lynda Robinson and am always looking for more mysteries based in Egypt. But Haney just isn't a good enough or sophistsicated enough writer to pull this off and I found the book much too long and tedious. Her descriptions were so overly-written as to be confusing. Lt. Bak is too undeveloped to be a compelling main character - all he seems to do is worry and I had a picture of him throughout wringing his linen hankie and frowning. Her dialogue is in places laughable - I doubt even the ancient Egyptians spoke in metaphores and similes or used the purple prose Haney puts in their mouths. Haney shows herself to be an amateur fiction writer by assigning action to body parts, which unfortunately is also one of my pet peeves. Yet there were so many eyes darting, glancing, gazing steering, taking on a life of their own I sometimes thought I was in the middle of an occular replacement convention. Where did Haney and her editor learn the basics of decent fiction writing? Haney's plot development is ponderous and the outcome is obvious early on. The motivation behind the murder bordered in my opinion on the juvenile. Haney makes a major faux pas - I won't say what it is because I don't want to spoil the book for anyone else but it's something no author should ever, ever do unless it is absolutely necessary. And in this case, it wasn't. If you want to read this book, get it from the library. Sorry, I don't usually write such harsh reviews but this is one author I can honestly say I won't read again.

This book is like "Hill Street Blues" set in ancient Egypt. The head of an Egyptian policy force has 5 days to track down the killer of a nobleman's son. Along the way, he discovers a plot to kill a powerful Kushite king. The setting is exotic, but the motives of each of the characters -- greed, power, lust -- are completely universal.

Amazon repeatedly recommended this book to me and I am really glad I took it up on the challenge. The Right Hand of Amon reads quickly and easily. I started it this morning and finished early this afternoon. I found another book by the same author that is to be released shortly, but parts of the Right Hand read like there have been books previously published. If this is so I'd be interested in learning of their existence. If this is indeed the first in a series as other reviewers have stated, I look forward to many more.

I recommend this to any who enjoy historical whodunnits.

This was a pretty entertaining "who dunnit." The ancient Egypt setting definitely helped set this apart from other mysteries I've read. I can't shake this feeling that the concept of "police" is anachronistic (which is might not be...I don't know much about the period), and this book reads like it is in the middle of a series (i.e., there are references to earlier events/activities that appear to assume that the reader is already acquainted with them). Overall, this was fun and light, with just enough twists to keep me interested to the end.

A murder mystery which, pleasantly, takes a non-traditional approach. The writing left me hearing, seeing and smelling ancient Eygpt. The characters had depth, even the victim, whose life was ended within the first couple of chapters. The main character was likeable, honest and yet had human foibles. I couldn't put this book down.

I could barely get through this book. Everything was padded to novel length when the content deserved little more than short story treatment. Even with the provided character glossary the political hierarchy and relationship was still confusing. There was little tension and drive. Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis have no competition here.

I had hoped I had found another great series of Egyptian myseries like those of Lynda S Robinson (my favorite) or Brad Geagley. Unfortunately, the book just didn't deliver in the mystery department. It is very descriptive of Egyptian life and I'll give the author credit for setting it in an uncommon part of Egypt. But the fundamentals of the mystery were off. It started too slow, it did build some intrique halfway through by creating a solid list of potential "suspects" but the resolution to the main mystery and a secondary mystery just left me unsatisfied. It's difficult for me to elaborate without revealing too many details of the book so let me just concolude that there are much better Egyptian mysteries available.