'Enthralling Egypt' Ancient Egypt Fiction Collection at AMAZON Kindle and paperback

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THE END. How many novels do you actually finish on your iPad? UPDATE

"Lives with you long after you turn 
the last page..."

(Reviewer - "The Smiting Texts" - #1 in my Egypt trilogy of adventure thrillers.)

It's so easy to buy a novel to read on your iPad, and it's also so easy and enjoyable to read.

But...

I sometimes wonder - is it also easy to forget to read on to the end, with all the other distractions on your iPad?

It's not as if you have a bulky paperback sitting there accusingly on your bedside table with a bookmark pulling a tongue at you.
Out of sight, out of mind?

I think we need a new iPad app. 

Every now and then it flashes up an image of your partly read novel and a bookmark jutting out to show how far you've come.

Either that or make sure the books you read drag you inexorably to the last page... and beyond.

Now a book-binge 3-in-1volume edition (Kindle and paperback)  at around 977 pages - and yes, in spite of the length, readers are reading this edition to the end, I am seeing!

And the intrigue DOESN'T END there...

There's a 9-book Anson Hunter series.

AMAZON KINDLE & PAPERBACK

LOOK INSIDE! Browse 3 opening scenes of my Egypt trilogy of adventure thrillers

Look inside all 3 novels in the Egypt trilogy

Browse 3 opening scenes of my Egypt trilogy of adventure thrillers ... right here.

(Opening - The Smiting Texts)

 

Chapter 1

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?”

“You are invited to Johns Hopkins University. They want to hear you speak.”

Anson goggled just a little. Johns Hopkins and Anson Hunter? His moment of elation quickly faded. They didn’t belong in the same sentence.

“A nice thought, gentlemen, but venerable institutions like Johns Hopkins don’t want people like me to speak. They would prefer us not to breathe.”

Anson had arrived to give a lecture on ancient Egyptian ritual smiting power and execration texts at a hired Masonic hall that evening.

He tried to move past, but the men blocked his way, smiling with steely politeness.

“Please come with us, Sir.”

“There must be some mistake.”

The spokesman frowned and reached inside his coat. Hell, Anson thought, what is this? Has mainstream Egyptology finally sent a hit squad? The hand came out of the coat. Anson resumed the business of breathing. The man flipped open a wallet, by way of introduction. Anson glimpsed a crest – an eagle inside a circle and the words: US Homeland Security.

(Opening - The Hathor Holocaust)

 

Chapter 1

AN EMAIL arrived at his hotel, giving him an address in South Kensington and a caution:

‘Come alone. Take care you are not followed. Change trains or taxis.’

It was a message from a mysterious young woman who had ambushed him on a train to London.

Satisfied with the evasive manoeuvres he had taken, he arrived at mid morning at a block of apartments and went up a chequered path to a black door with flaking paint.

Was it a trap?

He found the right number on a rusted panel and pressed a buzzer. While he heard no sound beyond, he felt an answering buzz and tingle run through his body as if he had touched a naked wire.

She had offered herself to him like a baited hook, using the lure of an Egyptian antiquity. The circumstances were suspicious, but there had been nothing suspect about the antiquity on her arm. For Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist, theorist and expert on the esoteric beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, there was an invisible ‘maker’s mark’ on the real thing that he could not mistake.

The door clicked open.

Should he go through with this? He shrugged. He liked to be flexible. He went inside and climbed a flight of carpeted stairs to be met at a door by the Egyptian-born Greek, Alexia, dressed in black, but wearing a smile that was bright and daring.

He went past her, caught a whiff of perfume.

She locked and chained the door. He saw that she was still wearing the Egyptian bracelet. Gold, turquoise and carnelian in an archaic design winked on her wrist.

“We can do this two ways,” she said. “Agreeably - or we can do it in a cold, business- like manner. I say agreeably. A good coffee, first. There’s an espresso machine here.”

“You say that as if this is not your permanent address. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

She smiled.

“Don’t let’s get all suspicious, Anson. May I call you that?” She took his coat and hung it behind the door.

It had the look of a furnished apartment. He noticed a forced assimilation rather than a blend of furnishings, a modern couch and dingy chairs in the sitting room. A bizarre piece of ornamentation caught his eye. It was an unpainted white porcelain cobra. A snake, here? It was sitting - or rearing - on the top of a television set as if to remind him that he had walked into danger.

“Where is it?”

“Sit, relax. What difference will a few more minutes make after thousands of years?”

Anson stretched out his long-boned frame in a chair and waited while she went to work in the adjoining kitchen area. He could view her from here.

A thousand years elapsed while she made coffee at a stainless steel espresso machine. The aroma of ground coffee wafted out and surrounded him, snugly enveloping, cosying up to his nerves. Maybe he could enjoy this.

She brought out his coffee and put one on a table for herself.

Then she vanished into a bedroom. What now?

He heard a squeaking sound. She came out again dragging a black leather suitcase on wheels.

“You’re walking out on us already?” he said.

She gave a small grunt as she swung the case onto a rectangular coffee table in front of him, unzipped its lid and swung it open. She lifted a towel from the top.

He bent over it and looked down into the heart of a golden cache of jewels floating in white clouds of cotton wool.

It was a hoard of relics dedicated to the goddess Sekhmet-Hathor, jewellery in the form of necklaces, menat collars, bracelets, golden and jewelled anklets, and small lioness statues and pendants of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian, turquoise and amethyst.

(Opening – The Ibis Apocalypse)

 

Prologue

Ibis catacomb, el-Ashmunein, Egypt

“SORRY, ANSON. Your search for the stela ends here!”

The voice of the woman funnelled down the underground passage, the echoes fluttering off the stone like startled bats.

Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist and theorist, felt a chill as the words reached his ears. It was caused as much by the emotional separation in her voice as by its distance. Her voice was startlingly removed. It was also hard and cold. A few minutes earlier she had been a companionable presence at his shoulder. Now this. She had deserted him, stealing back up the ramp of the passage.

Why?

A rumble of thunder came to deepen his puzzlement and then a screech, the sound of stone moving over stone, grinding, scouring. He felt a tremble under his feet. He spun his flashlight. The abrasion grew to a roar that made his eardrums cower.

A slab of darkness surged out of deeper darkness. His beam flared on a block of granite in a humanoid shape. A man-mountain. It was a stone block with a carved head on top… a colossal block-statue of a High Priest of Thoth, weighing tons.

The cubic man, with head, feet and hands protruding, squatted on a base with his knees raised and arms folded across them under a cloak to form a crushing volume in stone.

In the turmoil, the passage trembled and so did Anson.

The wigged and bearded face on top of the block wore a smile that belied the missile’s crushing intent as the statue shuddered over the floor. Hieroglyphs on the front of the block leapt into Anson’s vision like an execration hurled at him, a spell to obliterate an intruder.

The attack of the granite rockslide turned him to stone.

He had seen the block statue earlier, bulking at the head of the passage, and, fearing a trap, had urged his female companion to step over a granite flagstone in the floor, fearing it might trigger disaster.

But she had slipped back and deliberately set it off.

Now he understood the reason for the vast corridor and the ramped floor that plunged into the earth. It was built to speed the massive plug on its rush down the passage.

The cubic man gathered momentum and the sound of tortured stone assaulted his ears as he felt a blast of arriving air hit his body. It felt like a train coming down a tunnel.

He could never outrun it.

Then what?

 Start the Egypt trilogy here

Faster-than-light #neutrino time travel to ancient Egypt?

Could you live in the ancient past? My Egyptologist hero speculates...

"The first thing that strikes me, perversely, is a sense of profound deprivation, of being robbed of something that I’d always thought would be mine. My own life and times. I don’t really want to be stuck in history. At least not permanently. Not in an age before antibiotics, anaesthesia, modern dentistry and the Internet. Your own age is the oxygen you breathe, it suddenly hits me, and without it I am left gasping as I walk out of the building with my servant and into the daylight of an earlier age.

It’s so dammed quiet. No tourist buses on the roads, no aircraft flying overhead. Here, even the air is different. It feels younger and headier.

Maybe it’s the lack of pollution.

I know very surely in that moment that Egypt isn’t just a place for me. Egypt is first of all a concept. It’s the Egypt of the mind I love, self-contained and endlessly satisfying. I love to hanker after it, not live in it and die in it. So what do I do now? What would you do if you were an archaeologist stuck in 2,000 BC, knowing what you did about the greatest secrets of history?

Go out and hunt down Tutankhamun’s tomb before Howard Carter does? Tempting, but no, you wouldn’t.

How about cracking the tomb of great pharaohs like Seti or of Thutmosis? They’d be more rewarding than the boy king’s hole-in-the-wall..."

 Excerpt from The Hathor Holocaust (my renegade Egyptologist hero is also an avid blogger with a fondness for speculation)

Come on a journey across time to the dangers of the ancient past in my trilogy of Egypt adventure thrillers - click here

Update: "A museum is a dangerous place..." Hathor's Holocaust, in the Anson Hunter, independent Egyptologist, mystery thriller series

British Museum scene from the Egypt adventure thriller 'Hathor's Holocaust' (2nd in the 9 novel series)

‘A MUSEUM is a dangerous place.’

Sir Flinders Petrie, pioneer British Egyptologist, first said those words, but today Anson was thinking them.

A man had followed him to the British Museum.

Who was he?

Petrie had been thinking about another kind of danger when he’d made his famous remark about the dangers of museums. The founder of modern scientific Egyptology had been alluding to the manner in which the early Cairo museum had dealt with a royal mummy fragment found at Abydos, a single, bandaged arm, covered in jewels, the only remains of First Dynasty king Zer.

The curators took the jewels and tossed the arm way, the earliest royal mummy remains ever to come to light. It was a mummy horror story to eclipse any devised by the most febrile imagination, Anson had always thought, but right at that moment his mind was on the other worry.

Anson went up the steps and between the Ionic-style columns into the building. He passed through a crowded reception hall to arrive in the Great Court beyond.

Above the court, a tessellated glass and steel roof spread out overhead like a vast, glowing net, catching clouds, blue sky and a spirit of illumination, while the round, central building swelled like an ivory tower of learning. He crossed the clean bright space before heading left to the door of the Egyptian section.

Inside the dimmer light of the hall, a group of school children crowded around the Rosetta Stone in its glass display case. Two little black girls peered inside, their heads close together as they examined the stone, their hair braided in cornrows. An African look, he thought. It linked his thoughts to Africa’s greatest river, the Nile, and to Egypt’s irrigated fields that bounded it and made Egypt the breadbasket of the ancient world.

Excerpt from 'Hathor's Holocaust'

See series here

UPDATE: New edition of the 4th in the series "Night of Anubis".

My ancient Egypt fiction collection - Kindle and paperback

Break out from an Egyptian Museum!

Fantasy Egypt adventure for young readers

Archaeologist hero of my ancient Egypt trilogy respects unseen dangers from the ancient past

Hidden dangers among the hidden secrets of ancient Egypt?

In my ancient Egypt trilogy of adventure thrillers, the renegade archaeologist hero Anson Hunter is something of a phenomenologist, one who believes you have to experience and give value to the sacred in order to deal with it.

As a mainstream Egyptologist, Dr Melinda Skilling, says to him in The Smiting Texts:

“You’re special, not only because of your grasp of arcane Egyptian knowledge and practice, but because of your standpoint. I must confess that mainstream academics, restrained by what has been termed the ‘agnostic reflex’, are somewhat in the position of outsiders looking in, careful to keep an objective distance from Egyptian religion, mystical texts and esoteric practices. You, on the other hand, are a phenomenologist, one who believes that you must grant value and credibility to the sacred and engage with it experientially in order to appreciate it fully. I have a certain sympathy for that position.”

 A certain sympathy. Was she trying to be nice? Perhaps. She’d certainly earned points from him for her candour.

But the blunt instrument in the big blue suit didn’t try for points. His words came down on Anson like a mallet.

“Frankly, to many people you’re just a wild theorist. And that gives you a lot more freedom to operate in. Nobody listens to you - and nobody watches you. We can hide behind you.”

The Smiting Texts is followed by The Hathor Holocaust and The Ibis Apocalypse (Kindle and paperback). See them here

A dizzying abyss of time.. a countdown to Egypt's Dynasty Zero and beyond

A countdown to the legendary age of Dynasty Zero... and beyond

Try picturing a line-up of Egypt’s rulers stretching into the distance.

Imagine we are moving past this assembly on a river of time, like a water ride in a theme park, journeying back to the first historical dynasties and earlier.

We’ll ignore more recent history - a string of one hundred and forty seven Ottoman rulers, fifty seven assorted Mamelukes, over one hundred Fatimid, Abbasid and non-Abbasid rulers, scores of Byzantine Period Christian rulers and a line of forty three Roman Emperors.

We’ll start with Cleopatra, for, although Greek, she actually went native, spoke the language and adopted the religion.

Ready? We’re off.

We build up momentum and Cleopatra glides by in her Love Boat, arm in arm with Marc Anthony, her sails making the wind drunk with their perfume, but wait, there’s a cavalcade of six earlier Cleopatras and a fleet of fourteen Ptolemies stretching into the distance before we pass the monolith of Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kings.

Now the Persian hordes engulf us in the Second Persian period before we reach the last Egyptian born pharaoh, the magician-king Nectanebo II, working his magic on model wax ships floating in a bowl of water.

We’ve still got around two thousand, two hundred and seventy years to go before we get back to the pyramid age.

We travel through ten more dynasties and over fifty kings, including a detour of a hundred years as we see a line of Nubian, or Kushite, pharaohs mount the Horus throne, before we tumble into the darkness and chaos of the Third Intermediate Period.

Then we enter the New Kingdom and a new golden age in a line of three dynasties and thirty-three kings.

We rush by eleven Rameses kings alone, including Rameses the Great and his colossal seated statues at the Temple of Abu Simbel.

We see the boy king Tutankhamun posing for his golden mask. It’s still almost two thousand years before the pyramid age.

Now we pass the sun-drunk Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti in their brand new city of Akhetaten mushrooming magically in the desert wilderness of Amarna, then a parade of other pharaohs, including multiple Amenhoteps.

And then it’s on to the Thutmosids and Pharaoh Thutmosis the Third in his chariot and blue war crown, leading his armies out of Thebes to conquer the Levant.

Moving back in time before Thutmosis, we find the female pharaoh Hatshepsut applying her strap-on symbol of kingship, a false beard.

Dynasties seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen and a parade of over ninety kings passes by - compare this with the mere sixty six monarchs of Britain.

We find ourselves in darkness and turmoil as we hit the Second Intermediate Period and the Hyksos conquest of Egypt. Foreign rulers take over for two centuries.

We rise on to meet classical times, an austerely refined age called the Middle Kingdom. Eleven pharaohs slide past in all their gravitas, including Amenemhat III, builder of the Great Labyrinth.

Astoundingly, there’s still around eight hundred years to go before we get back to the Old Kingdom pyramid age.

Then a veritable chaos of kings tumble by, not quite ‘seventy kings in seventy days’ as in the first intermediate Period, but something very like it. We plummet into an age of chaos called the First Intermediate Period and we hear screams. It’s a horror section of three hundred years, where emaciated figures of death and famine leap out to terrify us like ghoulish animatrons.

As we regain speed, we come upon a line of thirty-six more kings. Dynasties six, five, four, three, two, one, flash past like numbers in a rapidly descending lift.

We have finally arrived at the age of the pyramid builders and the Early Dynastic period.

Worker hordes pitch stone pyramids like immense limestone tents on the plateau of Saqqara, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Step Pyramid of Zoser.

We’re over five thousand years from our present day. But have we hit ground zero yet?

Not quite. Other shadowy kings, as many as thirteen, with names like ‘Crocodile’, ‘Catfish’ and ‘Scorpion’, are beginning to emerge from the darkness of prehistory. There seems to be an unknown number of basements beneath.

We have just reached the borders of myth and history… “

(Part of an address to a US audience given by Anson Hunter, renegade Egyptologist and theorist in my novel ‘The Ibis Apocalypse’… out in Kindle and in paperback, Amazon, along with follow-ups 'The Hathor Holocaust' and 'The Ibis Apocalypse')

See my Egyptian Series and other adventure novels here

The many and varied races subjugated by Egypt under Rameses

Subjugated peoples under Rameses ll

At the base of the statues of Rameses the Great at Abu Simbel Temple we see the many and varied peoples/racial groups subjugated by Egypt during its imperial age.

Ancient Egyptian threat formula - an esoteric threat or real world conspiracy against the US and West?

Discover the secret of The Smiting Texts and get into an enthralling Egypt adventure thriller trilogy - HERE

A voice from the audience cut in.

“You really believe someone could put a remote hex on another country? On America?"

A heckler already. Anson peered. A man in the front row with military bearing and bulking up a blue suit, turned to throw a glare at the heckler.

In spite of the academic venue, this may not be a polite audience, Anson thought.

Anson hadn’t mentioned putting hexes on America and America wasn’t even on his mind. But it was on theirs, the heckler’s in particular.

“Do we have a few good Protestant Americans, Catholics and Jews in attendance today?” he asked the audience. “Then let me remind you about smiting in the Bible and Torah. The God of Moses hurled down some doozy execrations himself, with devastating effects: “… I shall make the land of Egypt desolate, and the country shall be destitute of that whereof it was full … I shall smite all them that dwell therein ... then shall they know that I am the LORD.”

He decided to bring ancient history up to the present. He flipped past a slide showing a shattered ancient Egyptian execration or cursing bowl, a clay vessel that contained a list of enemies and beside it one ritually shattered in order to bring foreign powers to their knees. He stopped to show a passage of text in Arabic on the screen.

“You think remote killing is no longer attempted today? It is, and it’s being used by dissidents in the Middle East. Smiting and execration might seem unthinkable in our desacralized Western society, so let’s move forward to the twenty-first century. Take a look. It’s a Palestinian text, discovered in the Dead Sea in 2002, by an Israeli Professor and it directed virulent thoughts against the leaders of Israel. Here’s a translation…

“Oh God almighty, I beg you God to destroy Ariel Sharon, son of Devorah, son of Eve… Destroy all his supporters, loyal aides and confidants, and all those who love him and whom he loves among the human beings and among devils and demons.”

“It came in a small, cloth-wrapped bundle, surrounded with lead, an interesting choice of metal since the ancient Egyptians also used lead for hostile symbolic and magical purposes, because of its heaviness and malleability. A modern day execration? Did this long-distance attack strike Sharon down? His doctors probably had a more prosaic explanation, like a stroke with massive bleeding in the brain, but it shows you what many still believe. And if you think that’s all a bit vague and low-tech, here’s something for the technocrats:

"Oh God, destroy all their security and policing apparatus, the computers, the electronic and listening equipment…”

There must have been a few technocrats in the room. It got a visible stir.

“The ancient Egyptians, who could engineer stone pyramids to optical precision, millennia before the real flowering of their empire, were not perversely stupid in one department of their lives, nor were they peculiarly occult. They were an intensely practical society. You don’t keep doing something for four thousand years if it doesn’t work. They believed that ritual execration and smiting – creative visualisation with potent maledictions thrown in – worked, and it protected their nation for thousands of years. A better investment perhaps than any Star Wars anti-missile system?” Anson suddenly switched off the PowerPoint...

(Excerpt from The Smiting Texts. Renegade British Egyptologist Anson Hunter is intercepted at a US airport and co-opted to address a Homeland Security Centre, the Centre for the Study of High Consequence Event Preparedness and Response, a consortium studying how the nation can best prepare for and respond to a range of unexpected large-scale incidents or disasters.)

Taking my ancient Egypt fiction writing on the road

I can write happily on the dark side of the moon. Hope to add more books beyond my ancient Egypt trilogy of adventure thrillers

The advent of e Books, Kindle and iPad means readers can enjoy e reading almost anywhere and now I am taking that spirit into my writing.

We have changed from living in a five bedroom house into this new Mercedes-Benz Diversion motorhome to travel around the country.

I call it iPad living, small, compact, writer friendly. 

The Silvery Nomad

My wife has taken to nomadic living amazingly easily too. She is doing a blog called Journeys of The Silvery Nomad

Writers must always be allowed their subject. Mine is ancient Egyptian archaeological thrillers. Why???

There's no picking how authors pick their heartland subject

A writer must always be allowed his subject, it’s said. 

With me it’s ancient Egyptian archaeological thrillers. Why?

How do authors pick their heartland writing subjects?

There seems to be no way to pick it.

When I look at fellow authors who Tweet, I find one is a qualified veterinarian. A veritable zoo of famous animal books spring to mind. White Fang, Black Beauty, National Velvet, Jock of the Bushveld, maybe even Jaws or Moby Dick, but no, this famous author writes science-based techno thrillers. 

Another is an authority on building structures and what makes them collapse. Great, I think, I can see the ultimate deconstruction thriller where an iconic Capitol building falls down trapping the president/congress. Who did it? Can they mount a rescue?

Forget it. 

I suggested as much to him, but he let it go to the keeper, in cricket terminology. This author has his imaginative head firmly into Sword & Sorcery sagas. Why not?

And me?

I grew up in Zimbabwe at the edge of a game reserve and have been a Creative Director (Mad Man) for international advertising agencies in Sydney Australia.

So naturally I write Egyptian thrillers about a witty and renegade British archaeologist named Anson Hunter and about dangers to the world from the ancient past. I am an amateur Egyptologist and I have been devouring the subject since I was about twelve years of age. I and my wife have also made numerous study trips to Egypt.

Go figure.

I suppose we each find our metaphor, our prism through which we focus the human condition.

I see archaeology as a metaphor.  It even applies to characters. 

People are like archaeological sites, stratigraphical layers of history, their secrets waiting to be unearthed, layer by layer.

Then there is the lure of buried and often forbidden treasures.

Much like life.  

We are all in search of for some ‘divine radiance’ that will illuminate our lives.

So while I travel around Australia in my mobile office and stimulate my mind with new ideas, I may branch out into new writing paths in the future… but I wouldn’t really bet on it.

Discover my heartland subject of ancient Egypt in the following adventure thrillers. Click here.