The Serpent on the Crown
The Serpent on the Crown is the 17th in a series of historical mystery novels, written by Elizabeth Peters and published in 2005. It features fictional sleuth and archaeologist Amelia Peabody. The story is set in 1922, in the dig season in Egypt. Plot summary
In 1922 the Emersons are excavating at Deir el Medina, living in Luxor, when melodramatic Mrs Magda Petherick appears, hands them a box with an antique that she believes killed her husband in November. She fears its curse will kill her. Emerson agrees to hold the antique and to get rid of the curse. After she leaves, they see that the box holds a solid gold small statue of a pharaoh, and it is both beautiful and a genuine antique. The work is quite skilled, likely from the era of Amenhotep. Their friend Cyrus Vandergelt assures them of its high value in the antiques market, and says he will be happy to buy it. Next, stepson Adrian arrives, with a rifle, complaining they have stolen the most valuable item in their late father’s collection. Ramses holds him until he is calm. Then his sister Harriet arrives. She takes care of her war-wounded brother. She says their father died of natural causes. Emerson revises his plan of work to learn the provenance of the statue. He goes to Cairo to get permission to work in KV55; he returns with Sethos. Experienced in robbing tombs in his past, Sethos never saw or sold that fine statue. He joins the household. News of the statue brings thieves and reporters

Heinrich Lidman joins the staff briefly. He ends up with a head wound in the river, but survives. To slow or stop intruders, they build a guardhouse. It gets bombed. They get a dog, Amira, to bark at strangers; someone feeds it drugged meat. Grandson David John scares his grandfather by moving the statue from the locked drawer to his toy chest. No place is safe. Ramses specializes in reading ancient Egyptian writing; there is a lot of it at the current site, and one note points to a change in that ancient culture, about asking the gods forgiveness for wrongdoing. He hires an assistant, Mikhail Katchenovsky. David Todros arrives in Luxor; David and Ramses are best friends. Emerson does the exorcism, to end the power of the curse Mrs Petherick named. All enjoy the performance. The next morning, they learn that Mrs Petherick’s body was found in the gardens of the hotel, with white flower petals scattered over her. She was dressed in red, not her black clothes as a widow. The autopsy reveals she was smothered. Amelia gets to work on finding who killed her. While Ramses and David reach Cairo in search of the Pethericks, Emerson realizes the golden statue is stolen, and that Lidman took it. He and Amelia take steps rapidly to find him, including the police, and the Vandergelts. Jumana knows where Lidman might hide. She goes there alone, to tomb 25 in the West Valley. Unstable Adrian has been harming his sister Harriet; Ramses and David find them at a lonely tomb in Giza where exactly that is happening. Ramses grabs Adrian, whose gun goes off but misses Harriet. Ramses and David take them to Cairo, and admit Adrian to hospital. Harriet stays with him. Lidman is in tomb 25, and he has tied up Jumana, holding a knife to her. Lidman hid the statue. Emerson negotiates with Lidman. Jumana rolls away from Lidman, Bertie Vandergelt grabs for the knife. Emerson jumps on Lidman, who escapes and starts climbing. Amelia shoots him in the leg; he survives the tumble down the cliff face. The scene shifts to the house, where Nefret is tending to Jumana; Bertie vents his strong views on the risks she took, for the first time ever he speaks forcefully and angrily to her for going out alone. Then Lidman is carried in, unconscious. Amelia sits with him; he briefly regains consciousness and talks to her before he dies. Lidman confessed that his true name is Morritz X Daffinger. Lidman, an archaeologist, had been killed in the war, but was comrades with Daffinger before he died. Daffinger was the first husband to Magda; they met in Leipzig and married in Berlin when she was 16. They wrote the successful books together. He was a prisoner of war and it took him a while to get home. She was bored before the war ended, not waiting for him to return, and went to England where she met her wealthy husband. Daffinger found her after she married Petherick, and began blackmailing her. When she came to Luxor, so did he, using the knowledge he gained from Lidman to get a position with Cyrus. He had called the statue “rightfully his” because it belonged to his wife. He killed her, after she tried and failed to kill him by pushing hum into the river. Her second marriage was not valid, so Mr Petherick’s collection passes to his children. The Emersons and Vandergelts search the tomb area, finding the statue when Sethos points out what to him is the obvious hiding place. Ramses asks Katchenovsky if he translated all of the note; he had, and wants to claim sole credit for it. Katchenovsky has a gun to kill Ramses; Amelia comes in to the room with her pistol and misses. She is wounded by Katchenovsky. Ramses beats Katchenovsky up after Amelia is shot. Katchenovsky is alive, charged with attempted murder. Her recovery takes a while, after Nefret operates on her. Daoud finds the one piece of the gold statue that was missing, the serpent in the crown, and puts the completed statue next to Amelia as she recovers. From more scraps of papyrus found at the dig, that man’s confession of thievery in the 18th dynasty names Tutankhamun as the statue he stole. Tutankhamun is the one pharaoh whose tomb has not been found. The statue was stolen from his tomb by a worker. The worker lived at Deir el Medina and placed it in a temple there, along with his note of confession. A modern day thief stole the statue and Ramses translated the note. Tutankhamun’s tomb is yet to be found. Harriet sells the gold statue to Cyrus. She needs the money to care for her brother, still recovering from the Great War. Title
The book's title is from the Poetical Stela of Thutmose III:
"I have robbed their nostrils of the breath of life and made the dread of you fill their hearts. My serpent on your brow consumed them." Reviews
Kirkus Reviews found this novel a bit less complex or convoluted in plot than others in this series, a plus. The author’s writing style in this series is excessive in their view, while the main characters are likable. “Peabody’s Victorian rhetoric can go over the top, but her likable family’s fans will find much to enjoy in an adventure less convoluted than usual, salted with the obligatory tidbits of Egyptology.”

Andrew Newman in The New York Times wrote about the audio book, specifically the recording by much-praised Barbara Rosenblat. Newman observed her “recording of "The Serpent on the Crown," the 17th installment of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody Mysteries series” in Chelsea for Recorded Books. Rosenblat is an actress, but uses different skills when narrating a historical novel; Rosenblat “was shifting quickly between characters with British, Indian, Arabic, Egyptian, Irish, Austro-Hungarian and Texan accents. Those distinct roles interacted with incredulity, shock, anguish and sarcasm. It was emotion layered on dialect layered on perfect enunciation.” Rosenblat explained that narrating a book means “having to do everything -- I mean everything -- with the voice. There is no upturned eyebrow, no body language." Rosenblat has narrated all the novels in this Amelia Peabody series. See also

List of characters in the Amelia Peabody series

References

Amelia Peabody
2005 American novels
Historical mystery novels
Fiction set in 1922
Novels set in the 1920s
Novels set in Egypt
HarperCollins books