Historical Crime Fiction from the Reign of Tutankhamun
The Amarna Mysteries
Four novels. Nine years. One detective. Queen Nefertiti investigates murders and conspiracies during the most turbulent decade in Egyptian history.
The powerful have never feared what is written in stone. They own the chisels.
Three deaths within forty-one days. The boy who will become Tutankhamun inherits a broken throne. And the woman history remembers as a beauty is the only one asking the right question: who poisoned them?
The Amarna Mysteries follows Nefertiti across nine years of Egyptian history, from the collapse of Akhenaten’s religious revolution through the reign and death of the young pharaoh she raised as her own. Each book is a self-contained mystery. Together, they form a single argument about power, justice, and the cost of civilization.
Built on Egyptological scholarship. Where the record speaks, the novels listen. Where the record is silent, the novels speak carefully.
The books
Five materials. One argument.
Q4 2026 · Book One Q2 2027 · The Restoration Trilogy (Books Two to Four) Q3 2027 · Book Five
The Poisoner’s Throne
Three deaths within forty-one days. Nefertiti suspects poison, but proving murder means destabilizing the kingdom she is trying to protect. A forensic investigation set against the transition from Amarna to Memphis.
Read the opening chapter (coming soon)
The Restoration Trilogy
The Hittite Reckoning
Egyptian soldiers are dying because someone is leaking military secrets to the Hittites. Nefertiti must find the leak before the war is lost. An espionage thriller set during the war for Syria.
The Restoration Murders
Officials overseeing the restoration of traditional temples are being killed. A serial-murder investigation set during Egypt’s counter-reformation.
The Dakhamunzu Affair
Tutankhamun is dead at eighteen, and Nefertiti faces her last investigation. A cold case reconstruction spanning three thousand years.
The Twelve Hours of Night
A novel of a single night, told in twelve chapters, one for each hour of the sun’s passage through the Duat. The mortal story closes in The Dakhamunzu Affair; here the mysteries belong to the dead, as the souls the novels leave behind gather on the sun barque to defend it against the serpent Apep and see the sun rise.
Enter the Amarna Period
The history beneath the fiction.
I
The Amarna Period
A guide to the most volatile decade of Egypt’s New Kingdom — kings, reforms, erasures, and what the evidence can and cannot say.
II
The Series
Geography, naming conventions, healers and poisons, scribes and bureaucracy — the world the novels are built on.
III
Behind the Books
Methodology, research, and a Reader’s Companion. How the record is respected, and where invention is allowed to speak.
Akhenaten & the Aten Amarna Art The Royal Women Evidence & Power Succession & Aftermath The Royal Family Tree Who Was Neferneferuaten? Horemheb Damnatio Memoriae Crowns of the Amarna Age Geography of the Series Naming Ancient Egypt Healers, Poisons & the Bitter Seed Scribes, Brushes & Bureaucracy
Reader’s Companion
Every name, place and title — explained.
Two graded glossaries and background guides to how the Amarna world worked: the calendar, the economy, the royal household, war and empire.