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In this stirring sixth novel in the celebrated series re-creating the splendor of King Tut's Egypt, one of the most famous murders in history may be solved. The beautiful Queen Nefertiti has been poisoned, and with the boy king Tutankhamun now ruling Egypt, a murderer is still at large - a killer who will topple an empire unless Lord Meren, the legendary Egyptian investigator, can discover a truth as elusive as the Sahara's shifting, bloodstained sands. .
A teenager on the great throne of Egypt is a dangerous thing. Tempted by debauchery, unbalanced by the murders that put him in power, King Tut is being driven mad by the question of who killed his beloved foster mother, Nefertiti.
Lord Meren is Tutankhamun's last hope. The detective and master spy is barely recovered from wounds received when he discovered who had administered the poi- son to the kingdom's adored queen ~ but not the evil mastermind behind the crime. Now he sees an imminent darkness consuming the world he knows, a conspiracy of such magnitude that the harmony and future of Egypt is threatened.
Joining with the astonishing woman warrior Anath, a.k.a. the Eyes of Babylon, Meren soon realizes that the one remaining witness to Nefertiti's murder is her old bodyguard, still alive in the up-river city of Syene. Sailing away from the majestic capital of Memphis, Meren begins a journey into a land awash in peril. For in a titanic clash of old ways and new, former gods and a new religion, a fanatical enemy is cun- ning and evil enough to plan the murder of a pharaoh-and waits for the right moment to destroy a glittering, incomparable world...
Against a breathtaking backdrop of temples and tombs, Meren begins another great investigation...in a story that enlivens history and proposes a solution to an ancient mystery more shattering, surprising, and perhaps more satisfying than any previously devised.
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