What a shame that archaeologist and writer Barbara Mertz has passed away. I absolutely love her Amelia Peabody mysteries, which not only have Egyptology galore, but are witty as can be. The humorous and romantic interplay between her protagonists couple Amelia Peabody and her mercurial husband reminds me of the magic between William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series of films.
I also agree with this:
“She writes with an informal grace and contagious enthusiasm rarely found in books by qualified scholars,” Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in his review of “Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs.”
Hertz was a great scholar and one of her gifts was to bring complex archaeology to the general public in a fun and accessible way.