Book Reviews
The book is a tour de force of plotting and narrative technique; the intertwining storylines lead with mounting inevitability to one of the most horrendously, hideously humorous endings in modern fiction. It isn't an ending for the faint of heart, but if you appreciated Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief, this one will knock you out.
Barbara Mertz - The Washington Post
Ralph M. Trilipush—an obscure Egyptologist who claims to have discovered the tomb of an unknown yet visionary Pharaoh—is off his rocker. The fun comes in the way his megalomania mirrors the temperament of supposedly levelheaded scholars.... Phillips is nearly as deft as Nabokov at parodying the academic mind.... Unfortunately, he tricks up his plot by adding a dull detective who labors to expose Trilipush’s lies, and by stealing a twist from The Talented Mr. Ripley. The result is pastiche overload.
The New Yorker
Where does fact end and imagination, illusion and wishful thinking begin? Phillips is a master manipulator, able to assume a dozen convincingly different voices at will, and his book is vastly entertaining. It's apparent that something dire is afoot, but the reader, while apprehensive, can never quite figure out what. The ending, which cannot be revealed, is shocking and cleverly contrived.
Publishers Weekly
Ralph M. Trilipush, the eponymous Egyptologist—a war hero who attended Oxford but never served in the military, with no record of his attendance at the venerable British institution? A sheltered, society heroine who drinks to oblivion and takes opium? These are but two central mysteries of this potpourri of intrigue, subterfuge, and deception concocted by Phillips.... [Q]uite tongue in cheek, a tableau of action and adventure in a 1920s setting. —Edward Cone, New York
Library Journal
A secretive archaeologist's obsession with an obscure Egyptian king uncovers several concealed histories—in Phillips's clever, labyrinthine successor to his prizewinning debut (Prague, 2002).... This is a suave, elegant novel, replete with sinuously composed sentences and delicious wordplay.... Alas, it's also intermittently labored and redundant.... Nonetheless, Phillips's formidable research and witty prose make this one well worth your time. He's que possibly a major novelist in the making.
Kirkus Reviews