The Serpent on the Crown

In 1922 the Emersons are excavating at Deir el Medina, living in Luxor, when melodramatic Mrs Magda Petherick appears, hands them a box with an antique that she believes killed her husband in November. She fears its curse will kill her. Emerson agrees to hold the antique and to get rid of the curse. After she leaves, they see that the box holds a solid gold small statue of a pharaoh, and it is a genuine antique. The work is quite skilled, likely the era of Amenhotep. Their friend Cyrus Vandergelt assures them of its high value in the antiques market, and says he will be happy to buy it.

Next, stepson Adrian arrives, with a rifle, compkaining they have stolen the most valuable item in their late father’s collection. Ramses holds him until he is calm. Then his sister Harriet arrives. She takes care of her war-wounded brother. She says their father died of natural causes.

Emerson revises his plan of work to learn the provenance of the statue. He goes to Cairo to get permission to work KV55; he returns with Sethos. Experienced in robbing tombs in his past, Sethos says he never saw or sold that find statue. He joins the household.

Heinrich Lidman joins the staff briefly. He ends up in the river, but survives.

To slow or stop intruders, they build a guardhouse. It gets bombed. They get a dog, Amira, to bark at strangers; someone feeds it drugged meat.

Grandson David John scares his grandfather by moving the statue from the locked drawer to his toy chest. No place is safe.

Mrs Petherick does not contact them again for a week. A note asks them to her hotel, where they see she is not there but all her belongings remain.

Ramses specializes in reading ancient Egyptian writing; there is a lot of it at the current site, and some of the words point to a change in that ancient culture, about asking the gods forgiveness for wrongdoing. He hires an assistant, Mikhail Katchenovsky.

David Todros arrives in Luxor, much wanted by Emerson for his skills. David and Ramses are still best friends. Emerson has friends to dinner and then does the exorcism, to end the power of the curse Mrs Petherick named. All enjoy the performance.

The next morning, they learn that Mrs Petherick’s body was found in the gardens of the hotel, with white flower petals scattered over her. She was dressed in red, not her black clothes as a widow. The autopsy reveals she was smothered and that led to heart failure. Amelia gets to work on finding who killed her.

Work at KV55 reveals some flakes of gold foil where the stand for the small statue would have been.

The book's title is from the Poetical Stela of Thutmose III:

"I have robbed their nostrils of the breath of life and made the dread of you fill their hearts. My serpent on your brow consumed them."

Kirkus Reviews found this novel a bit less complex or convoluted in plot than others in this series, a plus. The author’s writing style in this series is excessive in their view, while the main characters are likable. “Peabody’s Victorian rhetoric can go over the top, but her likable family’s fans will find much to enjoy in an adventure less convoluted than usual, salted with the obligatory tidbits of Egyptology.”[1]

Andrew Newman in The New York Times wrote about the audio book, specifically the recording by much-praised Barbara Rosenblat. Newman observed her “recording of "The Serpent on the Crown," the 17th installment of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody Mysteries series” in Chelsea for Recorded Books. Rosenblat is an actress, but uses different skills when narrating a historical novel; Rosenblat “was shifting quickly between characters with British, Indian, Arabic, Egyptian, Irish, Austro-Hungarian and Texan accents. Those distinct roles interacted with incredulity, shock, anguish and sarcasm. It was emotion layered on dialect layered on perfect enunciation.”[2] Rosenblat explained that narrating a book means “having to do everything -- I mean everything -- with the voice. There is no upturned eyebrow, no body language."[2] Rosenblat has narrated all the novels in this Amelia Peabody series.

• List of characters in the Amelia Peabody series