The Painted Queen by Elizabeth Peters and Joan Hess

I’ve started this series about a 19th century Egyptologist and her family many times, but this is the first time I’ve actually read it the entire way through. This is the 20th and final book in the series, though it takes place earlier chronologically. (The last chronological book, Tomb of the Golden Bird, culminated with the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, a fitting end to the family’s adventures.) Peters, the pen name of real-life Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, passed away before she could finish this last book, so her friend and fellow mystery novelist Joan Hess finished it, though it seems like she wrote the bulk of it and used Mertz’s notes as a guide.

It’s a fun read so far, concerning the theft of a bust of Nefertiti as well as an attempted assassination of Amelia herself, though other readers’ comments that it seems more like fanfiction than the real thing are accurate. Hess can’t quite nail the characters, and some details are off. It helps that Barbara Rosenblat narrates this one as she does all the others, providing continuity in sound if not always in word. Both Hess and Egyptologist Salima Ikram wrote forewords, and they help illuminate Peters/Mertz a bit more, including both her personality and her research methods for the books. They also note that Mertz had already written the last chapter and it is reproduced unchanged in the book; I look forward to finishing the book if only to read that particular section. While far from one of the best in the series, this is a curious and necessary book for completists.

The Future is Yours by Dan Frey

Much like my quest to find an end-of-the-world book as good as Station Eleven, I’m on a quest to find a book about time travel/time manipulation as good as Recursion. Alas, this is not it (in both pursuits I feel I will always come up short, but at least most of the books I find are good, even if they are not as top-notch as the aforementioned exemplars).

Frey’s book is about two men – Ben and Adhi – who invent a way for a computer to predict the future, precisely one year in advance. It’s told entirely in emails, text messages, and other recordings, framed by transcripts of a congressional hearing into the potential danger of the tech. While it certainly touches upon the potential for cataclysmic consequences from a machine that tells the future, the book mostly focuses on Ben and Adhi’s friendship, which is interesting and well executed but makes the story feel curiously narrow. The most interesting thing Frey does with his story is initially present the future as immutable – everything Ben and Adhi do to try to prevent something bad from happening in a year only ends up causing it – and then complicate that idea with an interesting twist to the plot partway through, setting the stage for a great ending that genuinely surprised and satisfied me.