Murder at the Mena House (A Jane Wunderly Mystery)
Murder at the Mena House? Quite likely.
You enter this hotel through a catch-as-catch-can metal detector, then you get lost in the dim historic hallways, and finally, you gaze from an upper window. To your left—a camel parking lot! To your right—THE PYRAMIDS. And in between—an Egyptian police station from which two officers are dragging a bloody young man, wrists harshly bound with plastic rope, toward an enormous blue-black paddy wagon.
At least, that was the scene a few years ago.
But this appealing if slightly clumsy (show, don’t tell!) novel offers a very different story. Erica Ruth Neubauer sets her first mystery, Murder at the Mena House, at that same luxury hotel in Giza on the outskirts of Cairo, but in 1926: calmer times, maybe. It’s absolutely Agatha Christie country (she stayed there), and Neubauer’s cast includes wealthy travelers, exotic local inhabitants, mystery men, and a plucky heroine. Characters are not what they seem; dark secrets are revealed. And everything ties together romantically at the end.
Mystery fans may also catch a whiff of Amelia Peabody here, although these main characters waste five days, eighteen chapters, and 111 pages before they actually visit THE PYRAMIDS (within camel-spitting distance!) Of course, there has been a murder.
This book promises to be the first of a series, so probably the main characters’ awkward names (Wunderly, Redvers, Dibble) are unchangeable. Hopefully, in Neubauer’s next there’ll be less eye-rolling and stomach-churning, more delicious descriptions of Twenties clothing and feminine lust, and improved period research. Christie’s characters never wish each other “safe travels” in 1926, and they never “pass.” Murder after murder, in endlessly entertaining ways, they die.
