Review: River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters

I have a girl-crush on Elizabeth Peters.  She set a murder mystery at a romance novel writers’ convention; she spoofs H. Rider Haggard and Gothic novels; she made one of her characters lament “the first sour grape in the fruit salad of togetherness”.  The woman cracks me up.  However, I thought that Children of the Storm should have been the last in the Amelia Peabody series (it gave me the pleasing feeling that the series had come full circle), and I have not cared much about the books that came after that.

But I liked River in the Sky.  It is set in Palestine in 1910 (so right before Falcon at the Portal) and deals with that thing of the Germans trying to get all buddy-buddy with the Muslim world in the run-up to World War I.  I have been interested in this ever since Jill reviewed Like Hidden Fire, which is a nonfiction book on this very topic.  The Emersons become involved in all sorts of intrigue and deception with German spy rings in Palestine.  Ramses gets into a scrape (as he does), and David goes after him (as he does), and, well, it just felt like reading one of the old books for the first time.  In a good way!

My one thing was, where was Nefret all this time?  She hardly had anything to do!  I mean I do not care about Nefret, but if she’s not going to have anything to do, I say leave her home.  She could be, I don’t know, hanging out with Lia all summer.  Learning sexy religious dances in the Lost Oasis.  Studying medicine.  I don’t care, actually, what Nefret gets up to when she’s offscreen, but if she’s going to be around, she should have a role in the plot.

I should really go read Like Hidden Fire.  I bought it in hardback for fifty cents at the Jefferson Parish book sale.

In order to create some transition, however awkward, INTO MY GRIEF AND PAIN, let me reiterate that Children of the Storm would have been a good place to stop writing books in sequence.  Children of the Storm took place in 1919 and 1920, and 1920 is the same year that Justice John Paul Stevens was born (on 20 April, the day of the year I call Day Most Likely for College-Age Me to Get a Headache Because the Jackass Sitting in Front of Me is Countercultural Enough to Smoke Pot on 4/20 Day But Not Countercultural Enough to Just Skip Class), and y’all, JOHN PAUL STEVENS IS LEAVING THE SUPREME COURT.

I am very sad about it, and I believe he will be difficult to replace.  On the other hand, it makes total sense that this should happen now.  Descriptors I would use for John Paul Stevens include: brilliant, old, was in a war, liberal-leaning, and wears a bow tie.  You know who else I would describe using all of those words?

THAT IS RIGHT.

See, the world plainly has room for only one brilliant ancient war-veteran liberal-leaning bowtie-wearer at a time, and Justice Stevens has recognized that his time is over.  How else can you explain the timing?

Some books I have read before

REREADING IS AMAZING.  Sometimes I forget how many amazing books I have already read, because I am busy reading new books, which are also (sometimes) amazing.  But this is what I’ve been reading lately.

Magician’s Ward, Patricia C. Wrede

Much like Mairelon the Magician.  Too many names of people, but I don’t care because I am more interested in Kim’s learning magic and having a Season and Coming Out at a ball and having Offers of Marriage to turn down.  In pretty dresses.  Can there be more pretty dresses?  And God, pretty shoes?  I need new shoes so much.  My favorite shoes are all reaching the end of their lives – the pink ones that go with all my red-toned tops; the adorable tan strappy sandals that I wore all over the place and I love them and I don’t want them to go; and the little black ones I wore to prom (I KNOW I HAVE TO LET THEM GO) and then forgot about for several years and then rediscovered, with the sweet little kitten heel.  Sigh.

Sorcery and Cecelia, Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

I love Sorcery and Cecelia.  Know why?  Because the two authors wrote it using the letter game!  The letter game!  They really did!  Kate has gone to London to have her Season, and poor Cecelia is stuck at home in Essex.  They have all sorts of fun with a marquis and a magical chocolate pot, and a wicked witch called Miranda, and beautiful friends and relations.

Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede are obviously having fun here, and they manage a plot that hangs together really well over two locations and considering they were making it up as they went along.  Reading this again for the first time in a while, I am extra triple curious about what they changed when they decided to get it published.  I would think to play the letter game, you’d have to be quite attentive to minor details in the other person’s letter, and also be flexible enough to ditch elements of the plot you had planned if the other person said something that messed it up.  Tricky!  But it sounds so fun.  One of these days…

Crocodile on the Sandbank, Elizabeth Peters

Amelia Peabody makes me laugh.  I don’t necessarily read this series for the mysteries, though I recall finding some of them quite satisfying.  I really read them for the characters – Amelia is so determined and brilliant, and Evelyn is sweet without being sweety-sweet (usually, and when she is sweety-sweet it just makes me laugh, and she’s all There is an image enshrined in my heart – oh, Elizabeth Peters, why are you so funny all the time?); and the Emersons are charming.

Elizabeth Peters has a wicked sense of humor, and as many times as I’ve read her books, they always make me laugh.  Well-done her for giving her detective a family without making her boring – and carrying on adding family members and not forgetting them in subsequent books.  She does make oodles of good characters, though at a certain point there are too many all at once.

But I’ve strayed from the point.  Um, yes, Crocodile on the Sandbank.  Did I say, it’s set in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century?  There are pyramids all over the place, and the characters all have sumptuous fun complaining about the treatment of antiquities (it is really shocking, to be fair – it makes me want to cry even when the antiquities in question are fictional). Plus, whenever silly characters show up, everyone makes fun of them!  Hooray!

What are some books you return to repeatedly?  If you like them so much perhaps I will like them too…

Two books by Elizabeth Peters

Elizabeth Peters – under this pseudonym as well as her other one, Barbara Michaels – is one of my most favorite authors of all the authors.  I like her because she writes the kind of book I like, but she does it (usually) tongue-in-cheek, and furthermore she has read all the same books I have read.  Not just, like, Little Women, which everyone has read, but you know, Rafael Sabatini and The Sheik and trashy things like that.  I appreciate this from Elizabeth Peters.

The Love Talker and Devil-May-Care, both of which I read in the last few days, are superficially rather similar.  In both, a woman comes to live with her eccentric relatives, and a number of strange happenings ensue.  In The Love Talker it’s all to do with fairies getting photographed, and in Devil-May-Care it’s ghostly apparitions of the ancestors of the posh families in the town. Devil-May-Care is, I must say, vastly superior in every way.  The resolution of the mystery is more satisfying, and I like the heroine better, and I like the elderly relatives better, and Ellie in Devil-May-Care has an aggravating fiance to be gotten rid of in a totally humorous fashion.  (Though why she was with him in the first place one is never really sure.)

If you are ever in the mood for a friendly, rather Gothic sort of mystery, Barbara Michaels is generally the way to go.  Elizabeth Peters has written these two ones, which are a bit Gothic, but most of her books under this pseudonym are regular (non-Gothic!  non-ghosty!) mysteries.  Her four books about Jacqueline Kirby totally slay me, especially the one set at a romance novel convention.  Oh, Jesus, I need to read that again.  I cleverly bought a Jacqueline Kirby omnibus in New York, but it was tragically published before Naked Once More got written, so it’s a Jacqueline Kirby, I don’t know, pluribus instead.

I really don’t feel this blog accurately reflects my tremendous fondness for Elizabeth Peters.  Her Amelia Peabody series is a load of lovely mysteries set in Egypt at the turn of the (20th) century, and she’s written one of her best women for it – she does men better than women really.  The series has been going on perhaps a smidge too long, but I’d say right up to Children of the Storm the books were all excellent.  I don’t even like mysteries that much.  She’s got a Master Criminal, and all sorts of mummies and antiquities and Howard Carter.  I love Elizabeth Peters.

(Oo, but don’t read Someone in the House.  It’s so scary!  I couldn’t sleep after I read it!  The house in question (spoilers ahead, but that doesn’t matter since I know you’re going to listen to me and NEVER READ IT), the house is spooky and haunted and it’s trying to make its inhabitants happy.  Yeeeeeergh.  It’s not trying to get rid of them!  It’s trying to make them happy.  It creeped me out so much!  Way more than haunted house mysteries where the house is trying to drive people insane or kill them.)

The Laughter of Dead Kings, Elizabeth Peters

I would say – not her best work.  People are never as interesting once they’re all kissy-face.  Vicky and John have much I&D, as usual, and it was charming how Elizabeth Peters put herself in the book.  I want to be Elizabeth Peters’s friend because she has read all the same trashy novels that I have read (like The Sheik! and she knows the bravest-by-far-in-the-ranks-of-the-Shah-damn-the-girl-she’d-been-laughing-at-him-all-the-time song!).  And Schmidt is the greatest swordsman in Europe.  And that’s about all I have to say about that.