Mystery Monday: A Face Turned Backward!

Our book today is A Face Turned Backward, the 1999 second installment in Lauren Haney’s delightful series of murder mysteries set in ancient Egypt and featuring stalwart (and easy on the eyes) Lieutenant Bak, commander of the Medjay police force in the frontier town of Buhen during the reign of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut. The book’s (indeed, the series’s) habitual focus on how blasted hot it is in Buhen and its surroundings makes A Face Turned Backward and its companion volumes particularly on-point reading as the first touch of genuine summer weather finally makes ready to be felt in Boston.

Even though it’s clear from that aspect of these books that if Haney ever visited Egypt, the unearthly heat of the place made a lasting impression on her (it certainly did on me – the only place I found hotter than Egypt’s deserts at midday was my Cairo rooming house at midnight), she’s too adept an old plotter to let it take over her stories, which are always not only elegantly constructed but richly detailed. Take just this moment of heroic Bak’s progress through the city on his way to a murder scene:

Bak, armed with his baton of office and a sheathed dagger at his belt, hurried through the towered gate, staying well clear of the ant-like line of men, backs bent low beneath heavy sacks of grain, who were unloading a squat cargo vessel and hauling its contents to a storage magazine inside the fortress. Their dissonant voices rose and fell to the words of an age-old workmen’s song. The stench of their sweat and the earthy smell of the grain tickled Bak’s nose, making him sneeze.

If you count them off on your fingertips, you’ll recognize this as Fiction Writing 101′s standard appeal to all five human senses, and the rest of A Face Turned Backward is equally immersing. In this adventure, what begins as a fairly routine concentration on foiling upriver smuggling uncovers a much bigger and darker kind of criminal plot, and Bak (and his hapless assistants) are thrust into the middle of forces that seem bent on toppling the monarchy itself. And along the way, Haney pauses the narrative with refreshing regularity to remind is that there’s more to Bak than a pretty face. He’s a contemplative young man. When he comes upon the mysterious wreck of a merchant vessel, for instance, he instinctively imagines her in better days:

Bak felt unaccountably saddened by the wounded vessel, an ordinary trading ship of moderate size, unadorned except for the eye of Horus painted on the prow. Yet seen from a distance it must have been beautiful, sweeping up the river with its weathered wood dark and glossy, its rectangular sail spread wide like the wings of a gigantic bird.

It’s been more than a decade since the last Lieutenant Bak mystery, and Lauren Haney is no spring chicken; it’s possible we’ll have no more of these adventures, which makes the ones we have all the more savory. I strongly recommend them all.