Title: Death on Tour, a Mystery by Janice Hamrick
Publisher: Minotaur Books, April 26, 2011
I picked this up at the library because of the cover picture of the Sphinx and the pyramids in the background and not because of the figure of the Grim Reaper with his scythe, although that let me know right off that the book was a mystery.
The book was a descriptive travel of Egypt for me, as I went on a tour with WorldPal, from the pyramids of Cairo, Giza, Abu Simel, Luxor, Karnak, the tombs of Tutankhamen, the Valley of the Kings, a cruise on the Nile. There is more travel information and overall descriptions of the pyramids than in Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile or even in Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody Mystery Series set in Egypt.
While you armchair travel, there is a murder mystery that plays out. Two murders on the tour, to be exact, and two attempts on the heroine, Jocelyn's life. Jocelyn and her cousin Kyla unwittingly become involved in the murder mystery when one in their tour group has a suspicious and fatal fall after climbing up on a rocky outcrop. Some one else is killed later in a bazaar shop, and Jocelyn is attacked in a pyramid and on board their ship on the Nile. The title Death on Tour is an apt one.
Very well written and plotted, I recommend the book to cozy readers and anyone interested in a murder mystery tour of Egypt along the Nile, with some romance mixed in.
Death on Tour won the 2010 Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur Books First Crime Novel Competition
