Charlotte Cross has built a satisfying career as assistant curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. It’s 1978, the museum has just opened the Temple of Dendur and is preparing to become the last US stop for the King Tutankhamun exhibit, and Charlotte at sixty has almost completed her long-planned article on Hathorkare, one of ancient Egypt’s few female pharaohs. Between that and a steady romantic relationship with the playwright Mark Schrader, life looks pretty good.

But if things stopped there, the story would end before it began. In The Stolen Queen (Dutton, 2025), Fiona Davis nimbly juggles three threads and two narrators: Charlotte in 1978, Charlotte in 1936, and Annie Jenkins in 1978. What connects them, besides a shared interest in Egyptology, is the Cerulean Queen, part of an ancient statue of Hathorkare and the stolen queen of the title.

The theft of the Cerulean Queen and the mystery surrounding it presumably explain the publisher’s decision to describe the book as an Agatha Christie throwback and a heist novel. It is those things, but what drew me in and kept me reading is the rich characterization of both Charlotte and Annie as they struggle, independently and together, to come to terms with their own pasts and plot a sustainable and satisfying future.

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