The Labyrinth of Osiris

September 17, 2012
A grisly murder in Jerusalem lights the fuse of Sussman’s powder-keg third thriller featuring Egyptian police detective Yusuf Ezz el-Din Khalifa (after 2005’s The Last Secret of the Temple), who’s reunited with his friend and Jerusalem counterpart, Arieh Ben-Roi. When investigative journalist Rivka Kleinberg is found garroted in an Armenian cathedral in Jerusalem, Ben-Roi follows up on the leads of Kleinberg’s last story to find disparate clues involving a powerful American mining corporation, an anticapitalist vigilante group calling itself “The Nemesis Agenda,” and a mining engineer’s disappearance in Egypt more than 80 years earlier. These “threads and connections, a whole spider’s web’s worth,” only twist, however, into even more byzantine intrigues embracing both Egypt’s ancient archeological treasures and modern-day religious clashes. Sussman dexterously weaves the many subplots into a taut skein, never losing sight of his characters’ humanity and troubled lives. Readers who enjoyed his previous cross-cultural thrillers will find much here to like. Agent: Laura Susjin, the Susjin Agency.

A woman is garroted in an Armenian church in Israel. In Egypt's Eastern Desert, wells are being poisoned. A militant group called "The Nemesis Agenda" is making trouble. These seemingly unconnected events lead Detective Arieh Ben-Roi of the Jerusalem police to call on his old friend, Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor Police. What transpires is a thrill-packed police procedural. Narrator Gordon Griffin deftly moves the plot through shifting time periods and international locales, building Sussman's multidimensional characters through subtle vocal changes. However, inappropriate mid-sentence pauses lasting a tick longer than necessary prove distracting. Even so, the wildly entertaining plot, some seriously bad guys, fascinating archaeological information, and the deep bond of friendship between the two detectives are beautifully rendered with honesty and insight by Griffin. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine