Who is Daniel Cane, unconventional murder detective?

Daniel travelled by train from London to Manchester for a meeting with the policewoman Rozalind at Interpol. The mystery of the golden coffins grew in his mind as the investigation dragged on without answers, holding its secrets within itself like a nest of coffins itself. He caught a glimpse of his quarried face reflected in the rainy glass of the train window as it sped through the English countryside. The outer mask, he thought. On the surface, at least for today’s meeting at Interpol, he was an investigator, a consultant on a murder mystery involving Egyptian antiquities - the Egyptologist detective as he had become known. And below that outer layer, the real Egyptologist, the qualified academic who had taken part in archaeological digs in Egypt and had evolved to become a writer, lecturer and sometimes guest Egyptologist on cruises in Egypt where he had fallen into the role of murder investigator in the Murder on the Nile Mystery Cruise affair. But what was below those layers? In the innermost layer. Not desiccated remains like a mummy’s, he hoped, but maybe something withering there, the dissolution of his youthful dreams that he would ever make a radiant find like a Howard Carter who had discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun and the most famous golden coffin set in history. Layers… Like archaeology itself. He was not a man usually given to deep introspection, to personal psychological digging, but perhaps because he was nudging his mid-forties and was living alone right now with his girlfriend Kate away in Canada, he came to wonder about the core of himself. What was down there, deep down? A man who hungered for mystery he supposed. The mystery of the ancient, the mystery of life now and the mystery of the life to come. At least ancient Egyptian religion and modern agreed on one thing. There had to be more. But the Egyptians took it more seriously and more practically with their complex burial customs, pyramids, tombs, mummies and magical books of the dead, roadmaps of eternity.

Excerpt from the latest in the Egyptologist Detective series on Amazon