Michael Pearce

Seymour, an agent of Scotland Yard, must watch out for his own life when he is sent to Barcelona in 1912 to investigate the murder of a prominent English businessman who was found dead in his jail cell after being incarcerated in the wake of the rebellion of Catalan conscripts against royalist forces.

The Great War has ended and Gareth Cadwallader Owen, who has spent his career defusing political time bombs, learns from his agents, some Greek and some Egyptian, that the streets of Cairo have been made dangerous by threats of real bombs. The first order of business is to ward them off. The second is to insure the safety of an impending major European delegation to the capital. What does it all have to do with Owen's shiny new motor car?

The murder of an Italian man in backstreet 1912 Cairo spells trouble for Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, British Chief of Cairo's Secret Police, as he uncovers a possible ethnic cleansing plot and a hidden cache of weapons.

The (Welsh) Gareth Owen is the Mamur Zapt in the British administration of Egypt, dealing with the political issues of various laws and crimes. Currently he is dealing with the difference between plunder and archaeology, the customs laws pertaining to same, and was Miss Skinner pushed or did she trip? And should he propose or not?

"What kind of a boat do you think this is?" said the eunuch indignantly when Captain Owen came aboard. Well, what sort of boat was it? After all, a young woman had drowned in the Nile, her body washed up on a sandbar. Apparently she had fallen off this boat. Owen, as Mamur Zapt, or head of British-ruled Cairo's secret police, deems it a potential crime. But when the poor girl's body suddenly vanishes from its resting place, he must investigate a crime that is as substantial as the Sphinx...and every bit as mystifying. Strange, he muses, that the girl would have plummeted off a boat when it was moored for the night in a river that was calm. What is even stranger is that the boat was in the hire of Prince Narouz, son of the Khedive, the nominal ruler of Egypt. Why had the prince commanded the dahabeeyab to cruise to Luxor in the first place? Certainly, he had no interest at all in antiquities. And what was an attractive and unwed young woman doing aboard the vessel after dark? Owen must mount a puzzling search for the truth that will take him from Cairo's sophisticated French-style cafes to the darkest recesses of its dingiest slums. Helped by his frightfully independent Egyptian mistress and a remarkable assortment of informants, he soon finds himself adrift in the seething waters of Edwardian Egyptian politics.