****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Amazon, I need more stars.A typical Peabody adventure filled with archaeological infighting, a family of assassins after Peabody and her son Ramses, and a delightful farce, concerning a famous artifact.And, after years of delay, joking with my sister that this book would not come out in our lifetime, I finally held The Painted Queen in my hands on its release date.And, for a day I could not open it.I was so aware that this was it, the final Elizabeth Peters Egyptology mystery. Once I read it, there would be no more.I also had mixed feelings about Peters' drafts being completed by Joan Hess. I have always enjoyed the latter's Claire Mallory books but had found her Maggoty world impossible.No need to worry. This collaboration was so well done, it was seamless, with no indication of what was Peters and what was Hess.I absolutely love this series, going back to my initial finding of Crocodile on a Sandbank so many years ago.I also have been known to sit down and reread them all again, looking forward to enough time to pass to do some rereading.As usual Peabody is oblivious to others, which causes her again to notice Ramses looking at a distressed Nefret, with no curiosity as to why. This also causes her not to wonder about a look Emerson gives their son near the end and what the two men in her life are up to.The results of that look are hilarious once understood by the reader.The only thing missing is not enough Sethos, but all in all a very satisfactory conclusion.This book is one of the fill-ins Peters added to flesh out her series near the end, not a continuation.The main reason I wanted the series to go forward was to see what Peabody's granddaughter Charlotte would get up to as she grew up.Perhaps best left to the imagination.
