Quote:A series of mystery novels, written by Elizabeth Peters. They're set -- mostly -- in Egypt during the last decades of the 19th Century and first decades of the 20th (I believe the latest is in 1923), and revolve largely if not solely around Egyptology. Amelia is highly intelligent but also highly opinionated; one excellently written situation involved her having to confront her own prejudice against Egyptians -- prejudice of which she'd believed herself completely free.
Amelia Peabody Emerson... Why does that seem so familiar? Would anyone care to enlighten a poor soul?
There's a great deal of humor in the stories, quite a bit of it at the expense of her selective memory if her ideas turn out badly. On one page, she proudly recounts nagging her husband into a certain course of action; two or three pages later, when it goes wrong, she writes that if he'd listened to her he'd never have taken that course. She also has an Egyptian friend who complains humorously about all the murder victims she discovers. "Every year, another body."
Amelia is an admirable character in many ways, but she can be very irritating. In addition to her dogmatic certainty of her own rightness in detecting crime, she fancies herself as a matchmaker, believing she has an all-but-infallible "awareness of the human heart." Among the SI snippets I mentioned dreaming up was one in which she'd try to pair my character up with a nice young lady who turns out to be a German spy (either during or just prior to WWI). I enjoyed the idea of her trying to wriggle out of the blame.
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Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.