Years and years ago I recommended a series of books about a family of archaeologists excavating Egypt in the late 19th-early 20th century. They were written by a woman using the pen name Elizabeth Peters. Her real name was Barbara Mertz; she died in 2013. She left an outline and notes for another book in the series at the time of her death, and after some discussion and apparently with some trepidation her friend and fellow mystery writer Joan Hess took on the job of writing it.

If you’re an Amelia fan, you will appreciate this. It’s published!

Mertz set each of the twenty books in a single archaeological excavation season. The new one covers the events of 1912-1913. In a talk at the Library of Congress in 2003 Mertz said that

her overall plan was to continue the series chronologically through World War I and end with the events surrounding the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, as the aging of the characters in real time presented a challenge to extending the series further. Although her age is only given in the first book, Amelia Peabody would have been seventy years old—and Emerson 67 or 68—by that point in history, making their often physically trying acts of heroism less and less credible. This stated goal was accomplished with the publication of Tomb of the Golden Bird in 2006.

She then expected to go back and fill in the gaps, which “The Painted Queen” does.

Who is the Painted Queen of the title? Why, Nefertiti, of course!

I’m looking forward to reading it. It’s always a crapshoot when someone else tries to pick up where a deceased author left off, but I’m willing to give it a try.