Anyone interested in archaeology, the history of Egyptology, and working in a museum, will love this read about THE STOLEN QUEEN. We follow Charlotte Cross from her days as a student on a dig in Egypt, in 1936. The interspersed timeline shows the same Charlotte, older and wiser, in her curator role at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
While in the Valley of the Kings, Charlotte is only rarely allowed to actually dig, being shuffled aside to do admin and local relations, but nevertheless she discovers a burial chamber and a broad-collar golden necklace. This is believed to belong to a female pharaoh, Hathorkare. In 1978, in New York, Charlotte was working up a scholarly report on this queen.
Young Annie Jenkins, who supports her selfish mother, gains a job as assistant to Diana Vreeland who co-ordinates the Met Gala. Annie suggests including an Egyptian necklace in the fashion show, which is how she meets Charlotte. Annie has been hanging around the free museum for years, but her new role shows us behind the capacious scenes. Someone else has designs on an Egyptian piece, and a sinister movement is revealed.
Between the possibility of a mummy’s curse, the lead-up to WW2 and constraints ever since, Charlotte never returned to Egypt after losing the love of her life. If she is to gain answers, she will have to return to teeming Cairo – and Annie is glued to her side, welcome or not. Annie has never been abroad (I don’t know why she has a passport then), but she can’t let a lady of sixty go off alone, and besides, both of them are in trouble.
The adventure starts slowly, seeming to be a women’s fiction tale, and maybe it is, but the second half is definitely more suspenseful. Most of the speaking characters are female, and we see women supporting women, as well as some museum docents, and wealthy volunteers, looking down their noses at paid staff. Plenty of real celebrities are namechecked for the gala, and Diana Vreeland is based on biographies of this lady. The author Fiona Davis tells us she altered some names and facts, and fictionalised crimes; but the real complexities of repatriating stolen antiquities or retaining them to study and display, are aired by several characters. Nothing is straightforward when dealing with art 4,000 years old.
Fiona Davis provides a splendid work in THE STOLEN QUEEN, full of dust and gold, and women of character, the Queen of Egypt included.
From New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis, an utterly addictive new novel that will transport you from New York City’s most glamorous party to the labyrinth streets of Cairo and back.
Egypt, 1936: When anthropology student Charlotte Cross is offered a coveted spot on an archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, she leaps at the opportunity. But after an unbearable tragedy strikes, Charlotte knows her future will never be the same.
New York City, 1978: Eighteen-year-old Annie Jenkins is thrilled when she lands an opportunity to work for iconic former Vogue fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who’s in the midst of organizing the famous Met Gala, hosted at the museum and known across the city as the “party of the year.” Though Annie soon realizes she’ll have her work cut out for her, scrambling to meet Diana’s capricious demands and exacting standards.
Meanwhile, Charlotte, now leading a quiet life as the associate curator of the Met’s celebrated Department of Egyptian Art, wants little to do with the upcoming gala. She’s consumed with her research on Hathorkare—a rare female pharaoh dismissed by most other Egyptologists as unimportant.
That is, until the night of the gala. When one of the Egyptian art collection’s most valuable artifacts goes missing . . . and there are signs Hathorkare’s legendary curse might be reawakening.
As Annie and Charlotte team up to search for the missing antiquity, a desperate hunch leads the unlikely duo to one place Charlotte swore she’d never return: Egypt. But if they’re to have any hope of finding the artifact, Charlotte will need to confront the demons of her past—which may mean leading them both directly into danger.
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