Faith, Fiction, Friends: “The Tutankhamen Murder” by Roy Lewis

A small-town thief beats a charge because of a technicality – the police screwed up the forensic evidence. A weekend dinner at a country estate, ostensibly about an art exhibition, leads to a discussion about a change in wills and executors. A peace conference in London involving both the Israelis and the Palestinians appears to offer the possibility of a breakthrough.

Newcastle attorney Eric Ward isn’t involved in the peace conference, but he is involved in the petty theft and the weekend dinner discussion. The host tells him that his duties as the new executor includes the delivery of a letter to the Foreign Ministry, upon the man’s death.

He’s also intrigued by a woman he meets at the dinner, a journalist who knows a lot about the so-called “curse of Tutankhamen,” the collective trail of mishaps and deaths that appear to have followed the archaeologists and financial backers of the famous 1923 excavation in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

Sometime later, thieves break into the home of the dinner host, stealing several objects, including a small statue of the god Anubis. The host apparently confronts the thieves and gets his head fatally bashed in for his trouble. What started out as a routine burglary investigation, headed by DCI Charlie Spate, becomes a murder investigation. And Spate and Ward, who dislike each other on a good day, are forced to work with each other.

Roy Lewis

And that statue of Anubis, likely found in the tomb of King Tut in 1923, is at the center of everything.

The Tutankhamen Murder is the 16^th novel in the Eric Ward mystery series by British author Roy Lewis. Originally published in 2008, it’s been reissued by Joffe Books and published this year. It contains all the classic Eric Ward elements – a legal angle, a small bit of romance, an intriguing story that starts small and grows large, and enough plot twists to keep the reader guessing.

Lewis is the author of some 60 other mysteries, novels, and short story collections. His Inspector Crow series includes A Lover Too Many, Murder in the Mine, The Woods Murder, Error of Judgment, and Murder for Money, among others. The Eric Ward series, of which The Sedleigh Hall Murder is the first (and originally published as A Certain Blindness in 1981), includes 17 novels. The Arnold Landon series is comprised of 22 novels. Lewis lives in northern England.