Out of the Black Land - Hardcover

Greenwood, Kerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1464200386 ISBN 13: 9781464200380

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, 2013

Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt is peaceful and prosperous under the dual rule of the Pharaohs Amenhotep III and IV, until the younger Pharaoh begins to dream new and terrifying dreams.
Ptah-hotep, a young peasant boy studying to be a scribe, wants to live a simple life in a Nile hut with his lover Kheperren and their dog Wolf. But Amenhotep IV appoints him as Great Royal Scribe. Surrounded by bitterly envious rivals and enemies, how long will Ptah-hotep survive?
The child-princess Mutnodjme sees her beautiful sister Nefertiti married off to the impotent young Amenhotep. But Nefertiti must bear royal children, so the ladies of the court devise a shocking plan.
Kheperren, meanwhile, serves as scribe to the daring teenage General Horemheb. But while the Pharaoh’s shrinking army guards the Land of the Nile from enemies on every border, a far greater menace impends.
For, not content with his own devotion to one god alone, the newly-renamed Akhnaten plans to suppress the worship of all other gods in the Black Land.
His horrified court soon realize that the Pharaoh is not merely deformed, but irretrievably mad; and that the biggest danger to the Empire is in the royal palace itself.

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About the Author:

Kerry Greenwood is the author of more than 40 novels and six non-fiction books. Among her many honors, Ms. Greenwood1 has received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia. When she is not writing she is an advocate in Magistrates’ Courts for the Legal Aid Commission. She is not married, has no children and lives with a registered Wizard.

From Booklist:

Greenwood, the Australian author of the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman mystery series, heads off in a radical new direction. Her new novel is set in ancient Egypt around the time of Nefertiti and Tutankhamen and concerns itself with a pharaoh’s grand—some might say megalomaniacal—plan to change the religious landscape of the country. There are also several subplots winding themselves in and around the main story (Nefertiti figures prominently in one), and the story is told in roughly alternating fashion by a pair of young scribes, one of them a sister to Nefertiti, the other a lower-class boy who dreams of a better life. Greenwood has taken a big risk here. Ancient Egypt as a source of literary material has been pretty well mined. But the novel feels fresh, partly because Greenwood isn’t insisting on shoehorning a traditional mystery plot into the book. She’s working on a much broader, epic scale that almost suggests Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings (1983). A real change of pace, but the majority of the author’s fans won’t be disappointed. --David Pitt

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