Forgotten Books: DEATH BEYOND THE NILE, Jessica Mann

This week's contribution to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books appears in my records in March 1991.  It was published in 1988, and is #5 in Jessica Mann's Tamara Hoyland series.

"A mix of the type of murder mystery and brilliant characterisation which makes Ms Mann one of today’s foremost crime writers.” Harriet Waugh, The Spectator

Tamara Hoyland, is still employed by the Government as an undercover agent. When a scientist goes slightly off the rails and books herself on a cultural tour of Egypt, Tamara, with her academic background, seems the ideal person to become part of her lecture team and keep an eye on her.
She finds herself part of a small touring party whose paying members have paid serious money to be on the trip. They form a curious mixture. Among them are a television presenter, a failed poet, a brother and sister who run an arts centre and a businessman as well as the suspected scientist.
The highlight of their tour is a visit to an excavation on an island in Lake Nasser where an archaeologist is working, whose TV series has made him a household name. The site is remote and primitive and while the visitors are there all the helpers, bar one, have been given leave.
By the time the party reaches the site some tensions have built up between its members. By the time they leave there have been two murders. Are the deaths related? Is there more than one killer present? Is it possible that there has been a Christie-like conspiracy?

Jessica Mann's (1937 - ) most recent book GODREVY LIGHT was published in 2009.
She has published 24 titles since 1971.
She is also the author of a non-fiction book, Deadlier Than the Male: An Investigation into Feminine Crime Writing (1981), about female crime writers from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers to Ngaio Marsh.

Tamara Hoyland
Funeral Sites (1981)
No Man's Island (1983)
Grave Goods (1985)
A Kind Of Healthy Grave (1986)
Death Beyond The Nile (1988)
Faith Hope and Homicide (1991)