I enjoy Lindskold's Firekeeper series, but this one is a little outside my interest. ( )

Jane Lindskold was one of the author GoH at MileHiCon this year. I had never heard of her, but I felt the polite thing to do was to buy one of her books and have it signed. Most of her oeuvre seems to involve wolves, but she has one book with an Egyptian setting so naturally I picked that one.

The Buried Pyramid isn’t bad. I’m not quite sure how to classify it; at times Lindskold seems to channeling Elizabeth Peters; at other time H. Rider Haggard; and at still other times a random woowoo author of “the secret wisdom of Ancient Egypt” persuasion. Not quite a fantasy, not quite a romance novel; closest would be “Young Adult”, perhaps. The heroine is your typical spunky orphan girl who finds herself attached to her British uncle’s Egyptology expedition. The setting is Victorian, so she gets to complain about the discomfort of corsets; and she’s American and from the Wild West, so naturally she can shoot; and her late father was a doctor, so she competent at medicine as well. And she sometimes wears trousers and rides astride, which scandalizes everybody but they get over it.

The Egyptology is done well enough; there are no egregious errors. There’s no “look and feel” for contemporary or ancient Egypt. It’s kind of a mystery so I can’t give to many details lest spoilers happen. Oddly enough, there’s an actual “buried pyramid” in Egypt, and I’ve been in it, and it’s a pretty numinous place, when I mentioned that to Ms. Lindskold she kindly included a comment about it with her autograph. ( )

Compelling, uneven, ultimately somehow unsatisfying, but a pretty good read for all of that. ( )

WARNING: Although I tried to give as few details about the plot as possible, don’t read my review if you already plan to read this book. It was difficult to explain my reaction without giving away part of what may have been intended as a surprise.

I liked this book, but it had some quirks. First of all, I was probably halfway through the book before I even remembered that this was supposed to be a fantasy novel. When I finally remembered what genre I was supposedly reading, I decided that I must have mislabeled the book’s genre in my database. There hadn’t been any clear fantasy elements in the story up to that point. I didn’t realize that I really was reading a fantasy novel until I was somewhere around the 75% mark. That was when the Egyptian mythological figures referenced throughout the story suddenly became a lot less mythological.

For most of the book, this read like a mystery or adventure novel set in the real world. I’m not sure of the exact time frame in which the story was set, but I’d guess it was around the late 1800’s. As a result of a variety of events, a small group of friends and family members set off together to seek out the tomb of a legendary Egyptian king. This tomb has supposedly been lost and forgotten deep in the Egyptian desert. During their journey from England to the Egyptian desert, the group of travelers face mysterious threats and attacks from people trying to dissuade them from their goal as well as physical hardships from traveling in the desert. I enjoyed this part of the book. I was curious who was behind the threats and what their intent was, and I was looking forward to finding out what would happen when (and if) they reached their destination. I also enjoyed reading about some of the Egyptian mythology, which I knew nothing about. (Unless you count being familiar with the names of some of the gods thanks to Stargate SG-1!)

At the 75% mark, my adventure unexpectedly turned into a fantasy and things got a little weird. If the entire book had been more along those veins, it wouldn’t have seemed weird to me. Fantasy is my favorite genre, and I have no problem suspending my disbelief as long as the setting is consistent and has some sort of logic to it. But the switch from real-world adventure to fantasy seemed to come out of nowhere and I wasn’t prepared to make that leap so late in the story. Technically one could argue that nothing had changed in the world presented in the book; it just hadn’t all been revealed to me yet. However, I had spent the entire book speculating about how things would turn out and then it felt like the rules were changed on me.

One other smaller complaint I had was that the author switched character perspectives within sections quite a bit rather than limiting perspective changes to section breaks. It was still easy to keep track of whose perspective I was reading from, but every time it happened it threw me out of the story for a minute.

I liked most of the characters, although some were a little annoying and difficult to empathize with. For example, I never really bought into Neville’s extreme obsession or motivations for finding the tomb. I also thought his infatuation with Lady Cheshire, another annoying character, was silly.

Despite my complaints, I enjoyed this story quite a bit. I didn’t have any trouble putting the book down when I had other things to do, but I also didn’t have any trouble picking it up and getting back into it. I found it really easy to picture the settings and events described in the book, but I never felt like the author spent too much time describing the scenery. I didn’t really notice it while I was reading, but after I put the book down I would often realize that I had very clear images of the things I had just read and yet I didn’t remember reading a lot of description. I guess she must have blended it in very seamlessly and struck an impressive balance between too much and not enough.

There were a couple simple word puzzles such as cryptograms in the book which I thought made a nice addition to the book, and fit in well with the story. I had fun solving them on my own before reading the characters’ solutions. I also enjoyed the slight mystery aspect of the story that kept me wondering and speculating about what would come next. That investment I felt in the outcome of the story is probably why I was more annoyed by the unexpected turn of events near the end. ( )

In his energetic youth, Sir Neville Hawthorne was knighted when he helped a distant relative of Prince Albert escape from a nomadic Egyptian tribe tasked with protecting the tomb of the Pharaoh Neferankhotep—a pharaoh who has, oddly, been nearly completely wiped from the annals of Egyptian history. Now, twenty years later, Sir Neville has resolved to return to the desert and seek out the pharaoh’s hidden tomb in order to solve the many mysteries surrounding the pharaoh—not least of which is why, so many centuries later, there are still those who would happily kill to protect the secret of the great king’s final resting place.

But Sir Neville has a problem—his niece, Jenny Benet, has been recently orphaned, and since Sir Neville is her closest living relative, the young woman must leave her frontier life in America and join her uncle in the more civilized lands of England. And Jenny is not a biddable young lady; she carries several guns with which she is a deadly shot, wears trousers at every opportunity, and refuses to ride side-saddle like a proper lady. Once she hears of her uncle’s plans, Jenny is bound and determined to accompany him, not only to Egypt, but all the way to Nefarankhotep’s tomb. Unable to dissuade her, Sir Neville allows Jenny to accompany himself and an eccentric young Egypt scholar of Sir Neville’s acquaintance to Cairo. There, they meet up with one of Sir Neville’s old army friends who has “gone native” and begin to plan their desert expedition.

It very quickly becomes clear, however, that the protectors of the forgotten tomb are still active and will do anything to preserve their centuries-old secret. Several attempts are made on the companys’ lives, foiled only by quick thinking and good luck; and a series of anonymous, encoded letters warning them of foul play are received at every turn. But the biggest shock awaits the rag-tag company in the bowels of Nefarankhotep’s buried tomb, and no one who survives this adventure will emerge entirely unscathed. ( )