The Museum Detective by Maha Khan Phillips Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense
Pages: 337
Published by Soho Crime on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Inspired by a real-life antiquities scandal in Pakistan, this gripping series debut introduces archaeologist Dr. Gul Delani, whose investigation into the discovery of a mummy gets complicated—and personal—when it collides with her years-long search for a missing family member. Perfect for fans of Sue Grafton and Elsa Hart.
When Dr. Gul Delani receives a call in the middle of the night from the Sindh police, she thinks they may have finally found her niece, Mahnaz—a precocious, politically conscious teenage girl who went missing three years prior. Gul has been racked with grief since Mahnaz’s disappearance and distracts herself through a talented curator at the Museum of Heritage and History in Karachi, she is one of the country’s leading experts in archaeology and ancient civilizations, a hard-won position for a woman.
But there is no news of Mahnaz. Instead, Gul is summoned to a narcotics investigation in a remote desert region in western Pakistan. In her wildest dreams, Gul couldn’t have imagined what she’d find amid a drug bust gone wrong, there is a mummy—life-size, seemingly authentic, its sarcophagus decorated with symbols from Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The discovery confounds everyone. It is both too good to be true, and for Gul, too precious to leave in careless or corrupt hands.
Aided by her team of unlikely misfits, Gul will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of it, even as her quest for the truth puts her in the throes of a dangerous conspiracy and threatens to collide with her ongoing search for Mahnaz. A portrait of a city fueled by corruption and a woman relentlessly in pursuit of justice, The Museum Detective is an exciting, gritty new crime thriller that announces a whip-smart and brilliant sleuth and builds to a stunning, emotional conclusion that readers won’t soon forget.
My Review:
It’s the wrong desert for a mummy. Not that plenty of cultures and conditions haven’t resulted in mummified human remains, but the police have just had a shootout over what appears to be an honest-to-Anubis Egyptian mummy, still in her sarcophagus, complete with cuneiform writing everywhere and absent her internal organs, in between the provinces of Singh and Balochistan. Which is not in or even near the Valley of the Kings. It’s in Pakistan, west of Karachi. A place where no Egyptian-style mummies have ever been found.
At least not until now.
The police need an expert to tell them if what they’ve found is what it looks like. Which is why they drag Egyptologist and curator Gul Delani of the Heritage and History Museum a few hours rather rough drive outside Karachi to give a somewhat sketchy and extremely rushed preliminary evaluation of what they’ve found in a cave out in the middle of nowhere along with a bunch of now-very-dead drug runners.
That sketchy and abbreviated examination of the mummy and all her worldly goods – or at least all that got moved with her from wherever she came from – has the potential to change history as it’s been known for centuries. From outward appearances, the mummy belongs to a female of royal blood, mummified in the Egyptian tradition, but with cuneiform representing Ancient Persia rather than Ancient Egypt.
Which would be unprecedented. Or she could be an elaborate hoax, and those are, well, entirely too precedented. Neither possibility explains what she’s doing in a cave in the middle of the desert in Pakistan in the midst of a police shootout with a gang of notorious drug runners.
Dr. Gul Delani, who has been fighting all of her life for the education she needed, for the career she wanted, for the independent life she has managed to claw her way into through grit and determination and no small of amount of pain, knows that if the mummy is what she purports to be the discovery will rewrite history and be the making of not only her own career but the careers of those she has mentored and nurtured as well.
If the mummy is a hoax, there’s an even bigger – and considerably more dangerous – puzzle to be solved. And that’s something Gul Dulani has never been able to resist – a puzzle to be solved and a question to be answered – no matter the cost.
She thinks she’s already paid that cost. But she’s so very, very wrong.
Escape Rating A+: This was a compelling read and a complete WOW in ways that I wasn’t expecting but in all the best ways. I’ve been in a murder-y mood, but I was looking for something that wasn’t merely a rehash of any of the usual suspects (so to speak) and this absolutely delivered.
It’s an immersive story from the very beginning, as we’re right there with Gul as she’s woken in the middle of the night by a telephone call that makes almost no sense. What do the Karachi police need with an Egyptologist? Her specialty isn’t exactly that much in demand where she is – and herself even less so because she’s herself. A female professional in a conservative Islamic country that seems to get more conservative by the day.
Not that her family wasn’t always traditional if not necessarily orthodox in their faith.
The case is tantalizing, but Gul knows that she’ll need a team she doesn’t have to do a thorough job of evaluating the find – especially in the limited time she has available. Also, as much as she wants the mummy to be the legendary Lost Princess of Persepolis that her sarcophagus claims her to be, Gul’s professional instincts tells her that her hopes have most likely exceeded even the remotest possibility.
At least until the mummy is stolen from the museum by the very police guards intended to keep her – and Gul – safe. Which is the point where the story kicks into an even higher gear as Gul continues to investigate everything. The mummy, the circumstances, the corruption that allowed her to be stolen and the drug lord who seems to be at the heart of the entire cesspit lurking under the rocks that Gul can’t stop turning over no matter how many people tell her to stop.
From that moment the story is a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma enrobed in suspense as it rolls down a steep slide of danger and finally screeches to a stop at its heart pounding, heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful ending.
At first, I thought this was going to be more of a historical/archaeological mystery – and that part of the story is utterly captivating. I wouldn’t have minded at all if the ‘Lost Princess’ had turned out to be real. And I got caught up in Gul’s hope that it might be as well.
But what really captured my attention and got me invested in this story were the intertwined mysteries of the criminal enterprise that created – and that bothered to create – what turned out to be a very elaborate hoax as part of an exceeding long con – and the way that mystery wrapped around the secret of Gul herself and the stubborn determination that has been the bedrock of her entire life.
Because Gul holds secrets even more tightly than the mummy’s wrapping – and the more she reveals the more fascinating she becomes. So I may have been caught by the mummy but it’s Gul that kept my attention firmly fixed on the page.
One of the things that I really loved about this mystery and especially this character is something that I didn’t figure out until very near the end. Gul has spent her life pushing uphill and against the wind. In the traditional, upper class society of Karachi where she was born and raised, girls were expected to grow up, marry well, have children and devote their lives to their husbands, their children, and the legacies of their families. That was not the life that Gul was built for so she spent her life fighting for the life she dreamed of.
She was a marvelous change from entirely too many stories where female central characters face similar struggles in order to reach their goals, where the story purports to be about the goal but instead focuses more than half the story on the struggle. The story of the struggle and the story of what the character does once they’ve carved or beaten something of the place they wanted – even if they are still defending that place – are different stories. What made Gul marvelous was the way that the author still conveyed just how much and how hard Gul had to fight to get where she was, and how much she still had to fight to maintain that place, without dragging the reader through every year of that fight. Because that’s what I want to see. I want to know what it took for Gul, or a character in a not dissimilar circumstance, to get to that place, but what I’m interested in is what they do with it.
And that’s this story. Gul is still beset on all sides both personally and professionally. Her professional enemies are petty and powerful. The corrupt officials and dangerous villains she has set herself against are, quite literally, out to get her. Her brother is a self-righteous asshole and a paper tiger at the same time. Her brother and sister-in-law have made her the scapegoat for everything wrong in their family – including the mysterious disappearance of their teenaged daughter, a young woman whose presumed death nearly broke all of them, but especially Gul.
Yet, she’s created not just a place and an identity for herself, but also gathered – and been gathered into – a found family that will support her through the best and the worst. And when the worst comes down around her, it’s those same people who help her, save her – and become, every single last one – her hostages to a potentially terrible fortune.
That The Museum Detective is being billed as the opening book in a series is that best bookish news I’ve had all week. I loved walking beside this fascinating character through her life and her city, and I’m thrilled that I’ll have the opportunity to do so again.
