Silent Keeps Series Alive

Lord of the Silent by Elizabeth Peters

I'll confess to having watched my share of reruns. There are even a handful of movies that I've seen more than once.

So I suppose I can't blame the authors who are interested in getting royalties for reruns. Of course, none of us are going to pay for a book every time we read it. That would seem wasteful. But we will shell out money to purchase a new book in a well-loved series even if the book is simply a re-run of the plot, characters, and dialog of previous books in the series.

Such is the case with Elizabeth Peters' Lord of the Silent. There isn't a whole lot of new stuff in this book. The characters are all a little older, but they still talk the same, run into the same villains, and solve the same type of crimes.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Amanda Peabody series is a fantastic one. It is set early last century and the protagonists are a family of Egyptologists who have murder mysteries to solve every season. These books are not straight, classic mysteries. Rather they are light, satirical mysteries that are intended to amuse you more than thrill you.

This book picks up where the previous one left off. Nefret and Ramses are now safely married (something that took eight or nine books to happen). The whole family heads out to Egypt with Nefret and Ramses staying on their own. They run into political and personal problems of the same variety they face every year: Threats, people shooting at them, disguised men attempting to kidnap them, and dead bodies. If you haven't read the previous two books in the series, be warned. This book wraps up a lot of loose ends from the previous two books and gives away both of their endings. This is not a series to be read out of order.

Overall, the series is a strong one. The books are still as hilarious and witty as they were in the beginning. This book introduces more laughs and more tears. The series has progressed to the point where Peters is able to introduce scenes into the novel that move us with concern for the characters we've watched grow up. Lord of the Silent is liberally sprinkled with the witticisms and adventure that the series is famed for.

Peters is skilled at making sure her characters are constantly developing and changing. Their dialogue may be the same, and their puzzles the same, but you can never be sure how relationships and personalities will change. This book takes a character that has been around almost since the beginning and reveals more of him than has ever been seen before. He goes from a shadowy, mysterious person to someone whom we see up close with all his foibles.

On the negative side, the book really is the same old, same old. You can get just as much pleasure from re-reading one of the earlier works. You'll see the same jokes and the same plots. Lord of the Silent also lacks for some of the earlier tensions that make the other books in the series so interesting. Most of the personality conflicts have been resolved and the smaller issues don't make for the great tension that was present in the earlier books.

Also, each addition to the series stretches the reader's credibility a little more. It is the bane of any series like this, but especially one in which the main characters have a non-police, non-detective occupation. Their lives are just too eventful to be believed.

These are minor complaints compared to the overall quality of the book. They are weaknesses that can be found in any series. However, we want to return to the soap opera and so I can only be thankful that Peters continues to produce new episodes so I can spend a day indulging myself with her wit and humor.

--B. Redman