Erica Ruth Neubauer •
Murder at the Mena House •

“When selecting an exotic location for travel, it’s advisable to choose one where the air isn’t trying to kill you.” So muses Jane Wunderly on arriving in Cairo. It’s 1926, and Jane’s aunt Millie has booked them rooms at the opulent Mena House—the only hotel in all of Egypt to boast a swimming pool. “If the weather continued in this vein, I suspected I would living in the pool before too long.”

Suffocating heat notwithstanding, Jane is thrilled to be staying in the shadow of the Pyramids. Aunt Millie is more concerned with getting her hands on a drink—any drink—that’s “a step above the bathtub rot being churned out at home.”

Jane soon finds herself in hot water (though not from a bathtub) when she’s suspected of murdering a fellow guest.

There’s a lot to love here: cardsharps, a blackmail plot, family secrets, stolen antiquities. Someone sics a scorpion on Jane, and Aunt Millie is brutally attacked with a cricket bat. The whole is so deliciously Christie-esque that you expect Hercule Poirot to be lurking behind the nearest potted palm. (Just in case you missed the homage, Jane’s choice of holiday reading is The Man in the Brown Suit.)

Will the charming Redvers—clearly not the banker he professes to be—feed her to a camel for seeing through his cover? “I don’t think camels are carnivorous,” he tells her. “The desert is a wide and scary place,” Jane retorts. “It’s hard to say exactly what goes on out there.”

Hang on to your fez for the fast-paced debut of a daring heroine who will stop at nothing. Jane’s would-be kidnappers get more than they bargained for when she jumps behind the wheel of their getaway truck.

But—oops—what were those bumps under the tires?