City of Dreams

Huy had been a scribe during Akhenaten's reign. He survived the bitter return to the old ways, gods & a new pharoah's reign under the yoke of rivals Horemheb & Ay, but at the cost of his profession. Unable to live by previous means he is 'unofficially' asked by a Medjay policeman to assist in solving the mysterious deaths of young beautiful girls. The deaths are due to unknown cause & pressure mounts to find the guilty party(ies) quickly. Huy uses keen observation, commonsense, contacts and instinct to probe the frightening murders. The author sets the mood & period very capably. Dialogue & descriptions are very readable & are void of distracting 'modernisms' & comparisons. While not a 'classic', it is a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon distraction & a pleasure to read.

This is the second book about the ex-Scribe Huy, forbidden to work as a Scibe (one of the most prestigious professions for a commoner) due to his link to the court of the "Great Criminal" the now dead Pharaoh Akenaten. Huy in his youth was a "true believer" in Akhenaten's new religion. Now, older, he doesn't know what he believes. However, due to his past, he is forever marked as untrustworthy" by the current regime, controlled by General Horemheb and Ay (a commoner,but the father of the late Queen Nefertiti), and led by the figurehead Pharaoh, the boy king Tutankhamun,who is still a child. Since he can't be a scribe, Huy has learned he has a gift for solving "problems", and rather unbelievably, these men in power turn to him when the daughters of nobles are being killed by a serial killer. Not to reveal the plot, but that was hard to believe. At any rate, as I said in my review of the first book, the concept of someone whose life has been destroyed in the aftermath of Akhenaten's fall, like someone of the 20th Century, who was a minor unknown person in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China and was somehow on the wrong side, and who then and forever had to scrabble and scrape to survive. In Huy's case he previously he held a proud profession and a middle or upper middle class lifestyle in the nation's new capital...all that was gone from him without his ever being given a chance to "recant that some were given...that is interesting and could be made more so I think. His loss of wife and son (she left due to his "politics" in the last days of the Akhenaten era) are never discussed, which I find not realistic. The books in the series are interesting but could be better.