WHICH BOOK OPENING draws you into reading an ancient Egyptian mystery, archaeology and mythology adventure?

THEY INTERCEPTED him as he came out of Baltimore-Washington Airport, two men wearing suits and an air of officialdom like a brisk cologne.
“Mr Anson Hunter, the British Egyptologist?” Egyptologist? That sounded good. Very establishment. Anson stood a bit taller, which placed his beanstalk elevation a few inches above theirs. The man could have said independent, renegade Egyptologist and phenomenologist, lecturer at out-of-town halls and auditoriums, writer, blogger and alternative theorist as well as leader of occasional, fringe tour groups to Egypt. But instead the man had said ‘Egyptologist’. “Who wants to know?” (First book in the Anson Hunter archaeology thriller series)

“Egypt - a real life movie set... the ultimate setting for a mystery. You couldn’t stage this stuff, could you?” The rich old man waved his be-ringed hand at the panorama of the pyramids on view from his balcony at the Mena House Hotel. (First book in the Daniel Cane, Egyptologist turned murder detective series)

A female mummy from ancient Egypt lay outstretched inside a hospital scanning machine. The British Museum had brought the mummy to St. Thomas’ Hospital for a non-invasive examination of the body beneath its wrappings. “We’ll begin by doing the head and neck in two millimetre slices. I’m just relieved that nobody will have to give this patient the bad news that she’s terminal.” (First book in the mythology investigator team series)

It began with a fall. Madeline Coyle had just visited the Death and Afterlife gallery upstairs and was on her way downstairs to the Ancient Egyptian Sculpture Gallery when it happened. One of her fashionable heels betrayed her on the edge of a stone stair. It took her balance and Madeline collapsed with the progressive grace of a marionette into the Sculpture Gallery.

He should have known to keep moving. Freezing on the spot gave him away. She saw him standing there doing an impression of a statue. Perhaps it was instinct that made her turn unexpectedly. In that moment he crossed the invisible frontier between observer and the observed. “Do I have to do a selfie?” she said, waving her camera. “Sorry?” He said it more as an apology for breaking into her world. When you shadowed someone you did so from an objective distance, like viewing a movie or play, with the understanding that you did not belong in that reality and must never enter it.

Giulietta, an archaeologist and excavation team leader, was alone in the ancient Egyptian tomb when she found it. A text, like graffiti, appeared scratched in urgent letters across the wall. Her bedrock belief in science and accepted reality crumbled at that moment like the plastered wall in front of her eyes. The scrawl had previously been hidden underneath an ancient layer of time, mud and white gesso, and had only just emerged.

THE DEMON DEMIGODS surged through the Delta reeds. They fell on our village, heavy infantry with padded armour, axes, khepesh sickle-swords and spears, as well as flaming torches. Their demigod-scent, sickeningly sweet, washed against the mud-brick houses of our Nile village and flooded down the alleys like streams from the banks of a broken dyke. I grabbed the arm of a small girl at my side and ran between houses. I heard a scream rise above the tumult like a panicked bird taking to the sky. My mother. She called out my name. “Menes, run - fly to the reeds. Run!” The Roy Lester Pond Egypt fiction collection - Amazon paperback and Kindle