Death in Thebes

By: Red and Catherine Rahm

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A woman has been put to death for blasphemy. Her crime - she drowned her new born. Her stated defense - she was saving her son from damnation. The priests of Amun fear a new cult; the city is chewing a new novelty vice, and Mahu the mystic is only tasked with predicting the sex of the solar princess' first child. Surely there is another matter more deserving of the great Mahu's soothsaying, especially when the detective knows he could at best make a 50-50 guess. Pulled into various plots, Mahu investigates the affairs of greater men to discover if all of Thebes' latest intrigues are connected. Set in ancient Egypt, in the years just prior to the reign of King Thut, the story's hero uses a combination of intuition and rudimentary forensic evidence to solve these mysteries. All the while, he stimulates his own thought process or intimidates his suspects with the tool of a tarot deck. Egypt's Sherlock or the ancient's answer to Columbo? Death in Thebes explores police work in the late bronze age. Master Mahu as a Nubian is practical and epicurean, quite different from the stoic and superstitious Egyptians, but this separation allows him to seek more worldly answers and motivations to explain the mystery. The reader will note connections between Mahu’s search with those used by a modern detective, yet via methods transposed to four thousand years ago. The narrative can be scrutinized for clues to solve the whodunit mystery, before the whole story is revealed. Death in Thebes is the second novel in a series of stories using a common setting and characters.