Tuesday, March 25, 2025

The Stolen Queen

The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis, 352 pages

Charlotte Cross was an archaeology student in the 1930s when she helped discover a female pharaoh's tomb in Egypt. Fifty years later, she's helping curate the arrival of an exhibit of King Tut's riches at the Met when a necklace from the female pharaoh's tomb — a necklace previously thought lost in a horrific accident — reappears at the Met on loan from an anonymous source. Pair that with the theft of an important Egyptian artifact and Charlotte's own research (both stolen during the Met Gala, no less!), and Charlotte is forced to confront her own past in an attempt to salvage her career and find the missing artifacts.

I'm a sucker for both Egyptology and the Met Gala, and I read this book with high hopes that it would deliver on both fronts. Instead, it was kinda meh, and focused more on the relationships than on the historical elements. (Also, it drove me nuts that, just for fun, the author created a red carpet for the 1978 Met Gala, when it didn't have one at all — and then told us exactly that in the afterword.) There are better historical fiction titles out there.

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