Papyrus

Papyrus is a suspense novel that sets a modern murder beside a very old riddle. Robert Hardaway twists a current-day mystery around a puzzle surrounding the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti. Someone, the description says, is using twisted modern science to obtain a priceless historical artifact, and the book is the race to learn who and why.

The catalogue gives the book three kinds of shelf: suspense, historical fiction and Egyptology. Open Library also lists Egypt, fiction, so expect scenes set in or around that country. Two timelines of curiosity run side by side, the present-day investigation and the question of what the ancient evidence really says.

Our record shows this as a 2006 publication from Western Reflections Publishing Co., 250 pages in length. It is fiction from first to last, so the plot belongs to the author, even though the queen at its center was a real person. If you like your thrillers with a little archaeology in them and no gore for its own sake, start here. The pairing of a laboratory-minded villain with an ancient relic is the hook, and the Egyptian setting supplies the atmosphere around it.

The book is for readers who enjoy mysteries that wander into museums and archaeology digs. Fans of Egyptology who don't mind a thriller wrapped around it will find plenty of subject matter, and so will people who've visited an exhibit on ancient Egypt and wanted a story to go with it. It also works for a book club that likes a plot with two layers. It is not a textbook, and we have no scholarly notes on the Nefertiti material, so treat the history as backdrop for the story.

Robert Hardaway is a professor at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, where his profile says he teaches civil procedure and evidence. Papyrus is his book from 2006, one of four that we publish, along with Lily Queen the same year. We have no notes from him on how the Egyptian material was researched, and we won't guess. His author page lists everything of his in our catalogue.

More about Robert Hardaway →

Nefertiti lived in the fourteenth century BC, roughly 1370 to 1330 BC by Wikipedia's dating, and was a queen of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty. She was the Great Royal Wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Together they promoted Atenism, a religion centered on the sun disc, the Aten, and around Akhenaten's fourth year the capital moved to Akhetaten, the modern site of Amarna.

Her name changed to Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti in the fifth year of his reign. Older scholarship held that she vanished from the record around year twelve. A 2012 inscription from the Dayr Abu Hinnis quarry, dated to year sixteen, shows she was still alive and in her position, and many Egyptologists now place a possible reign of her own after Akhenaten's death, though that remains debated.

The famous painted bust is attributed to the sculptor Thutmose and came from his studio complex. It is now in the Neues Museum in Berlin. The gaps in what we know about her are exactly the kind of space a novelist can work in.

Source: Wikipedia, Nefertiti