Return of the Pharaoh is the latest Sherlock Holmes pastiche by Nicholas Meyer, otherwise known as a Hollywood director (including two Star Trek movies) and writer. I greatly enjoyed the first two novels, The Seven Percent Solution (1974) and The West End Horror (1976) (particularly the latter, which featured George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker, and Gilbert and Sullivan among the cast). I missed his two follow-ups from 1993 and 2019, which appear to have attracted mixed reviews. This latest book, which plays out in 1910 in Egypt, attracted attention on Facebook groups devoted to the Amelia Peabody books, mysteries solved by a family of English Egyptologists between 1884 and 1922. Sadly Meyer’s book is not up to that quality.
I did enjoy Return of the Pharaoh, but unlike the Peabody books, which were written by an Egyptologist, Meyer’s book takes a number of liberties with the facts, and the entire explanation of how a hitherto unknown royal tomb was located by our heroes makes no sense at all.