Twenty-eight-year-old Leona King thinks that she has it made. She has just been married to a distinguished Egyptologist who has a family estate on St. Simons Island in Georgia to boot. Her new husband, Richard King, is a gentleman who courted her in proper style and showered her with gifts despite her humble origins as a “swamper” from the Okefenokee Swamp. She has at last realized her lifelong ambition to make a proper “lady” of herself.
Along with her marriage she has become stepmother to a rebellious sixteen-year-old girl named Margaret. The teenager naturally resents Leona trying to take her dead mother’s place in her father’s affections and is jealous of the time her father spends with Leona. But even Margaret, Leona feels, will come around in time.
As soon as the King family settles in their new house in Cairo things begin to change rapidly. On her birthday her stepdaughter gives her an ancient scroll full of hieroglyphics. Her husband tells Leona it is a Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian text full of spells and magic chants to help the newly dead person gain admission into the afterlife, the Land of the Setting Sun. The scroll is to help him avoid getting eaten by the Devourer after his heart is weighed on the scales of truth against a feather and found wanting. Leona has no idea where Margaret got such a scroll. She remembers seeing her in the souk, taking something from a woman covered with dark veils from head to foot with only a claw-like hand protruding.
From that moment on Leona’s once perfect world closes in on her. She finds herself kidnapped, locked in a tomb, nearly driven mad, and tormented by an Egyptian spirit who has somehow been loosed on her. She must fight for her very life in this supernatural novel about Egyptian archaeology in the 1920’s.
