Book Review: The Last Camel Died At Noon (Amelia Peabody #6), by Elizabeth Peters

The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Last Camel Died At Noon, by Elizabeth Peters
★★★★★ and a ♥!

Synopsis: The last camel is dead, and Egyptologist Amelia Peabody, her dashing husband, Radcliffe Emerson, and precocious son, Ramses, are in dire straits on the sun-scorched desert sands. Months before, back in cool, green England, Viscount Blacktower had approached them to find his son and his son's bride, missing in war-torn Sudan for over a decade. An enigmatic message scrawled on papyrus and a cryptic map had been delivered to Blacktower, awakening his hope that the couple was still alive. Neither Amelia nor Radcliffe believes the message is authentic, but the treasure map proves an irresistable temptation. Now deep in Nubia's vast wasteland, they'll discover too late how much treachery is afoot (and on camelback)...and that survival depends on Amelia's solving a mystery as old as ancient Egypt and as timeless as greed and revenge.
In A Sentence: A fun, classic adventure story, and one of my favorites in the series
My Thoughts: This story is definitely on of my favorites because of the plot. The last book was more of a classic Sherlock Holmes mystery, while this one is more of a classic explorer/adventure story, where the main characters go in search of a long-lost city and get more than they bargained for. It seems that with each book, Elizabeth Peters is giving you a little something of everything: mystery/detective, ancient history, historical fiction, romance, humor, feminism, adventure, and now even adventure/exploration and discovery! Every time I read these books, I keep thinking back to when the movie The Mummy came out: it wasn't a great movie (actually it was pretty bad), there definitely wasn't a whole lot of depth to it, but it was all in good fun and you end up enjoying it anyway. I feel the same about these books, except they're soooo much better than a blockbuster film (for one thing, the Egyptology in this novel is extremely accurate, thank you very much). Sure, there's not a whole lot of depth to the characters or to the stories themselves, but you getting a little bit of everything out of each book, and end up enjoying them as swashbuckling adventure stories with a good deal of chuckling peppered throughout.
I think I'm going to keep on going with the series, at least until I get tired of it (I mean, there's 19 books, eventually you start tiring of the whole thing), so you'll probably see more reviews like this along the way. But hey, if you get tired of my reviews, then go read the books for yourselves! Strongly recommended.

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