The Bride Box

July 8, 2013
Set in 1913, Pearce’s 17th Mamur Zapt mystery (after 2008’s The Mark of the Pasha) showcases the author’s gift for combining humor with a whodunit puzzle. Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, or head of the secret police for the Khedive (the Egyptian government under British rule), looks into the case of a little girl, Leila, found injured underneath a railway carriage in Cairo. Owen takes Leila into his household, since no one comes forward to claim the girl. Meanwhile, a rotten corpse turns up in a box meant to hold a bride’s trousseau shipped from Luxor to Cairo. The victim turns out to be Soraya, Leila’s older sister, and Owen comes to believe that Soraya’s death may be related to a resurgent slave trade. Pearce manages to keep the long-running series fresh with logical developments in his lead’s personal life, while capturing the tensions of the time, nicely exemplified in Owen’s working relationship with an Egyptian colleague.

August 1, 2013
One young woman lost and another found are the keys to the Mamur Zapt's latest adventure in 1913 Egypt. A bride box serves as an Egyptian woman's hope chest. The brightly decorated box normally contains her trousseau, the clothing and articles she's collected in anticipation of her wedding day. What it doesn't normally contain is the bride. So it's distressing to find a bride box addressed to Pasha Ali Maher that doubles as a coffin for the body of Soraya, a basket weaver's daughter whose aspirations toward a marriage above her station--perhaps with the Pasha's slow-witted son Karim, perhaps with another member of his household--were cruelly ended by her strangulation. Luckily, Soraya's sister Leila, whose father, Mustapha, sold her to the Sudanese slaver Abdulla Sardawi, has run away from her new owner and landed in the household of Gareth Cadwallader Owen, the Mamur Zapt who heads the Khedive's secret police. But there's not much the little girl can reveal about her sister's fate, and both the Pasha and his lady suavely maintain that it has nothing to do with them. Mobilizing his usual resources--his old friend parquet prosecutor Mahmoud el Zaki and Georgiades, a Greek investigator with a positive genius for drawing petty bureaucrats into imprudent confidences--Owen connects Soraya's death to an ominous smuggling ring and a pair of seriously dysfunctional families. As always in this comically understated series (The Mark of the Pasha, 2008, etc.), both crime and punishment are consistently upstaged by a lovingly detailed portrait of Egypt during the Great War. The result is a bit like a police procedural reimagined by Douglas Adams.

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September 1, 2013

The old world confronts modern changes in 1912 Cairo. Gareth Owen--the Mamur Zapt--must investigate shocking allegations about human trafficking in his 17th case (after 2008's The Mark of the Pasha).

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2013
Pearce offers another thoroughly charming entry in his Mamur Zapt series. In 1912 Cairo, Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt (head of the secret police) is faced with a devilishly tricky case. A little girl is found stowed away on a freight train from Luxor, the brutalized body of a young woman is discovered in a traditional Egyptian bride box, and it seems the child slavery trade, which was supposed to have ceased years ago, is still thriving. But these three, seemingly unrelated incidents are only the first clues in a puzzling case that extends from the teeming streets of Cairo to a backwater village in upper Egypt to the Sudan, linking in the process one of Egypt's richest men to some of its poorest. Political motives, slave trading, a spurned wife, gunrunning, kidnapping, and a tragic love story all play roles in this bizarre mystery, which discombobulates even the usually unflappable Mamur Zapt. But with his usual single-mindedness and keen understanding of what makes humans tick, he eventually cracks the case. This is a deftly plotted, cleverly written, highly entertaining mystery, but it's the gentle humor and the warmth of the characters that earns it two thumbs decisively up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)