Back in the 1990s, Gill wrote a trilogy of historical crime novels set in Ancient Egypt. The protagonist was a minor scribe, who discovered he had a talent for solving “puzzles”, specifically who committed a murder. The novels were set during the Eighteenth Dynasty, when Akhenaten became pharaoh and tried to make Egypt monotheistic. He was overthrown and replaced by Tutankhamun.

In 2015, he returned to the world of Huy, scribe turned occasional detective, and published a further three novels in the series. City of Desire (2015, UK) is the middle book of this second trilogy. The stories of these novels are very much predicated on the world in which they’re set. These are not English murder-mysteries in pharaonic drag.

In City of Desire, the dwarf in charge of pharaoh’s harem is murdered. A perpetrator is eventually identified and punished, but Huy remains unsatisfied. It’s mostly politics – an old friend turned rival, their career is partly dependent on events in the harem. Pharaoh is also trying to hang onto his throne, but no one is entirely sure what prompted the murder of the dwarf. Or the subsequent murders in the harem.

City of Desire is not your typical crime novel, with a, er, crime, and someone solving it. There are indeed crimes, but Huy fails to solve them, and only later works out what happened once the political dust has settled. Where the book succeeds, however, is in presenting life in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. I’ve no way of knowing how close it is to the reality, but it’s definitely convincing. Gill discusses what is known in an author’s note:

“we know a comparatively large amount about life in Ancient Egypt … since the science of Egyptology began, scarcely more than twenty-five percent of what might be known has been revealed.”

Worth reading.