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eBook Category: Mystery/Crime
eBook Description: Ewan Chisholm, despised drunk and gifted Egyptologist, is ordered by his curator to find a horde of pharaonic jewelry found in an envelope in the late Sir William Garfield Tate's papers. Tate and his Nubian mistress were killed for these jewels. Ewan embarks on an adventure to find both the jewels and the murderers ... before they find him.

eBook Publisher: SynergEbooks, Published: SynergEbooks, 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: February 2004

15 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [239 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [287 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [204 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [633 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [231 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [221 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [249 KB] , hiebook (KML) [522 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [266 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [189 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [236 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [266 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [310 KB]
Words: 69853
Reading time: 199-279 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"Hugh McLeave is an accomplished storyteller, and this tale of skullduggery among the pyramids moves along at a cracking pace. For those who like their adventure to be spiced with a little erudition and set against a romantic background, The Bent Pyramid is highly recommended."--William Norris

Hell must be something like this. A claustrophobic museum basement where lost souls (like him) separated from their material bodies moved among artifacts from immemorial burial chambers. Chisholm tried desperately to concentrate on his work, but the buttery, dust-laden light wavered before his eyes as he broke open the crate borrowed from the Cairo Museum and unwrapped several scarab amulets and the small, sculpted ushabti figures which were buried with pharaohs and eminent Egyptians to serve them in the hereafter.

If only they would act as his apprentice sorcerer and hold his hand, for he felt like death himself. In that stifling basement, he alternately sweated and shivered; for eight eternal days and nights he had not touched alcohol, not even through his skin with aftershave lotion. Now he had the shakes and his tongue felt too big for his parched mouth. But he must hold out. Hadn't he promised Danny Inglis, his Alcoholics Anonymous confidant, that he'd stay sober this time and break the habit for good?

So, he toiled on, cursing Sheldon Wright, Director of the Aspenwall Foundation, who had wished this job on him. Nine months hence, the Foundation museum upstairs would hold an exhibition entitled The Great Pharaohs, and Chisholm was cataloguing exhibits from six different foreign museums and writing captions for them. In two weeks, he had listed more than a thousand scarab seals, papyrus scrolls, hieroglyphic panels and cuneiform tablets; he had spent so long in this purgatorial hole he had almost forgotten what life upstairs looked like.

For a moment, he paused at the wooden sculpture of an Egyptian chariot purportedly found in Ramses II's tomb. A phony if he had ever smelled one. And this faience head of Nefertiti he dated no further back than twenty years, its providence most likely Cairo's Khan el Khalili bazaar. Yet, he catalogued them faithfully. Sheldon Wright wouldn't know a junk-shop chariot and a flea-market Nefertiti from a sacred bull's foot.

As he bent over the crate, something hard hit him on the shoulder and he spun round as though he had seen a ghost. Sheldon Wright's secretary, Jenny, was standing grinning at him, a flask and two cups in her hands

"Jenny, you scared the shit out of me creeping up like that. It's spooky down here."

"My, but you are jittery, Ewan. What did you think I was--something out of a sarcophagus?"

"No--Beelzebub himself."

Jenny looked at him quizzically then laughed. "But you know Beelzebub, in the skin of Seldom Right lives aloft, and he sent me down here because he wants to see you pronto." As she spoke, she unscrewed the flask top, handed him a cup, then poured them both milky coffee and dropped two sugar cubes into each steaming cup. "That's to wash the pharaonic dust down," she said.

Jenny knew his problems. Who in the Aspenwall didn't? However, she never referred to them, even when he guessed she wanted to offer her shoulder, or her mouth or herself. Well, she wasn't to be spurned, he thought, looking at her as he sipped the tarry, bitter coffee. She was blonde, nubile, eager, and still the right side of thirty.

"What does Seldom want?"

Jenny shrugged her ignorance. "All I know is that he took a call from a Mrs. Seagram, genuflecting and licking the handset mouthpiece, then sent me into this nether world to fetch you."