City of the Horizon (Huy The Scribe) Review

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(More customer reviews)"City of the Horizon" is the first in a three-book series by Anton Gill. For Ancient Egyptologist whodunit fans, Gill's Huy the Scribe mysteries are first rate. Set in the immediate aftermath of Akhenaten the Heretic's death at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the whole civilized world seems to be crumbling at the speed of light, "City of the Horizon" introduces us to an out-of-work scribe named Huy, discredited due to his allegiance to Akhenaten.
Down on his luck and with few choices (none of them admirable), a dispirited Huy is literally plucked off the banks of the Nile by a school mate friend Amotju, who has a problem. Knowing Huy's traits from childhood, Amotju convinces the despairing Huy to help him: it's the ages-old story of jealousy and romance. Amotju is an incredibly wealthy man who has some of the eyes and ears of the power structure of the time.
Still, the story goes much deeper as soon Huy finds himself in that tangled web we weave Sir Walter Scott so clearly wrote about: a murder here, a robbery there, thefts, political and religious intrigues,the secret police, and more murders, just as the new boy pharoah Tutankhamun comes into power. Amotju seems to be a saving grace for Huy, who literally seems to be brought back to life with these opportunities to help his love-stricken friend.
It is no surprise that Gill creates a well-written, well-thought out storyline and he especially triumphs with the character of Huy. The author's penchant for landscape and atmosphere seems to capture the time and place, at least as perhaps lay readers of the period might imagine them. His plot development moves repidly and surely to a convincing climax and ending. Readers will readily want to move on to the next episode, "City of Dreams" and then the last "City of the Dead." All are excellent reads.


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Palace intrigues, the deaths of one-time royal favorites...it may sound like Tudor England, but it's Egypt during the 18th Dynasty, about 1350 B.C.Akhenaten, the "reformist" pharaoh, has died, and his successor, the child pharaoh Tutankhamun, is effectively controlled by political schemers with no love for Akhenaten's old supporters, now deemed heretics.Many of these have lost their lives, but Huy, once a scribe in Akhnaten's court, is luckier: He's lost merely his home and the right to practice his trade.In desperation, Huy becomes a sort of traveling troubleshooter, the world's first private eye. City of the Horizon marks his first case, bringing him up against both Egypt's powerful priesthood and a brutal gang of tomb-robbers, all while he's trying to evade the clutches of the secret police. The modern world, it seems, has no monopoly on duplicity and corruption.First U.S. publication

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