The Face in the Cemetery (Mamur Zapt, Book 14)

Description

A classic murder mystery from Michael Pearce's award-winning series, set in Egypt in the 1900s, in which the Mamur Zapt confronts the secrets of his past. It is the beginning of the war and the Mamur Zapt, Gareth Owen, British head of Cairo's secret police, is called in to investigate a human corpse abandoned in a cat cemetery. Is the villagers' talk of a mysterious Cat Woman mere superstitious nonsense, or something rather sinister? The Mamur Zapt is preoccupied with missing guns and dubious ghaffirs, but the face in the cemetery refuses to go away. And Owen comes to realise that it poses questions that are not just professional but uncomfortably personal...

Michael Pearce grew up in the (then) Anglo-Egyptian Sudan among the various tensions he draws on for his award-winning Mamur Zapt series. He returned there to teach, and retains a human rights interest in the area. In between whiles his career has followed the standard academic rake's progress from teaching to writing to editing to administration. He finds international politics a pallid imitation of academic ones. He lives in London. He is now a full-time writer. He was awarded the Crime Writers' Association's prestigious Last Laugh Award for funniest crime novel of the year for the 'Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt'. Michael Pearce is also the author of the crime novels featuring Dmitri Kameron, set in Tsarist Russia of the 1890s.

'Probably the best in a consistently entertaining series' Literary Review 'Highly recommended' Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph 'Pearce takes apart ancient history and reassembles it with beguiling wit and colour' Sunday Times 'Marvellously convoluted... Dryly and deeply funny' Literary Review 'Sheer fun' The Times