The Emersons, including son Ramses now 8 years old, return in 1895–1896 dig season to excavate at Dahshoor, Egypt with real pyramids for Amelia.

Enid Debenham, socialite and heiress to her father's fortune, scandalizes Cairo society by associating with the Russian prince Kalinescheff.

He is brutally murdered in Enid's hotel room, which sends her seeking a safe place until the police stop considering her as a suspect.

In Cairo, at the hotel, Emerson and Ramses get a message to meet the private detective Tobias Gregson who once met Amelia; they depart.

He returns the vessels valued by the local Coptic church, which he took last season, because he read in a newspaper that Amelia was not pleased with their theft.

He poses as a private detective, an obnoxious American woman tourist, wanting to see the pyramids, and as Viscount Everly.

She figures out to put something personal (her pink flannel and a pendant from Emerson) out the window shutters, in hopes her husband and son will see it and rescue her.

Emerson tells Amelia how the cat Bastet remembered Sethos, who had fed her chicken during one encounter, and recognizes his scent, confirming they were at the right place; then they look up to see the pink flannel.

Ramses, 8-year-old son of Amelia, refers to Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels.

I put it to you that it would be typical of the strange sense of humor of the man known as Sethos to select as a pseudonym the name of the character Mr Sherlock Holmes—the most famous private investigator in modern fiction—despised as a bungler and a fool."

... Mr Gregson was working undercover.”[1]Kirkus Reviews found this novel, with its murders and young love, to be "Loaded with wit, irony, Egyptian lore, Victorian mores, good-humored flamboyance and solid entertainment."

The main character, feisty Amelia, copes with a lot, and most interestingly, when finding herself the "madly desired object of the supercriminal's machinations".