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Summary
Summary
"An utterly captivating romp from the treacherous tunnels beneath Jerusalem to the lost City of Ghosts (Petra, Jordan) to the tumult of revolutionary Paris....Dietrich spins a merry magical mystery tour, winningly intricate and anchored to actual historical figures and events....Mr. Spielberg! Mr. Lucas! It's your move."
--Seattle Times
Dashing and courageous American adventurer Ethan Gage returns in William Dietrich's The Rosetta Key--the thrilling sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's acclaimed Napoleon's Pyramids. An eighteenth century Indiana Jones, Gage swashbuckles once again, this time in pursuit of a precious Egyptian relic that would give its owner the power to rule the world. The Rosetta Key an adventure in reading that is not to be missed, especially by fans of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels and aficionados of a grand literary tradition dating back to Jack London, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard, and carried on today by such notables as James Rollins, David Liss, Steve Berry, and Kate Mosse.
Author Notes
William Dietrich lives in Anacortes, Washington.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Last seen in Dietrich's Napoleon's Pyramids, fleeing the forces of evil in a runaway hot-air balloon over Egypt, Ethan Gage undergoes further life-threatening adventures in this rollicking sequel. Nine months before the balloon incident, Gage arrived in the Holy Land with his benefactor, Napoleon Bonaparte. After various misunderstandings involving the secrets of the Great Pyramid, Bonaparte became his implacable enemy. Now, accused of treason by Napoleon's minions, Pierre Najac and Najac's boss, the French-Italian count and sorcerer Alessandro Silano, Gage flees to Jerusalem, where he searches for his former lover, Astiza, who he fears has fallen into Silano's hands. Gage is also hunting clues that may lead him to the fabled Book of Toth, an ancient tome that promises to reveal the secrets of the universe. Ever the incorrigible gambler and all-around scamp, Gage makes an irresistible antihero. The ending promises more volumes in what one hopes will be a long series. 8-city author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The sequel to Napoleon's Pyramids (2007)picks up pretty much where that book left off. Ethan Gage, the American adventurer, having barely escaped death during his time in Egypt with Napoleon, is looking for a little peace and quiet, but when he's approached with another can't-miss Indiana Jones-like treasure hunt, he's off again, this time to find the fabled Book of Thoth, the possibly apocryphal ancient Egyptian scroll with supposedly magical properties. Much capering about late-eighteenth-century Egypt results, with Gage dodging all variety of assailants while attempting to get his hands on yet another elusive artifact with the power to both entrance and corrupt all who seek it. Like Napoleon's Pyramids, this is a fast-paced, lively historical-adventure yarn that combines entertaining characters, an intriguing story, and lots of derring-do. Dietrich has a real knack for these slightly over-the-top thrillers, and readers familiar with the work of, say, James Rollins or Matthew Reilly (7 Deadly Wonders, 2006, for example) need only be told that this fine novel is right up their alley.--Pitt, David Copyright 2008 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-A sequel to Napoleon's Pyramids (HarperCollins, 2007). American adventurer Ethan Gage, protege of Benjamin Franklin, meets up once more with Napoleon as the French general is beginning his 1798 invasion of the Holy Land. Moving from Jaffa to Acre to Mt. Tabor to Petra and then to Alexandria and Rosetta in Egypt, Gage is never more than one step away from trouble. He is in search of his beloved, Astiza, last seen falling from a hot-air balloon into the Nile, and at the same time he is doing a little espionage for Napoleon's British enemies and hoping to find an ancient Egyptian scroll, the Book of Thoth. Gage's gambling skills, his knowledge of electricity, and his quick wits keep him alive in situations that would daunt a lesser man. He has adventures in love and war, comes close to solving an ancient mystery, and provides an ingenious explanation for the missing piece of the Rosetta Stone. Historical fiction meets thriller here, with plenty to interest fans of both genres. The action is nearly nonstop, the humor is plentiful, and the intrigue is more than enough to keep the pages turning.-Sarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Review
In this exciting and well-written follow-up to Napoleon's Pyramids, which traced American frontiersman Ethan Gage's adventures in Egypt during Napoleon's 1798 abortive attempt to conquer the Middle East, our 18th-century Indiana Jones seeks a lost love who might have died searching for a mystical, ancient artifact, the "Book of Truth," stolen from the Great Pyramid by Moses and brought to Israel. This possibly sacred scroll is also sought by villains who believe it has magical properties. Dietrich's latest tale is ripe with rich detail of the Holy Land of the period and its disparate peoples. Fascinating historical and fictional characters and good dialog add to the mix. Offering high adventure and good history, it's also great fun. Recommended for all popular fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/07.]-Robert Conroy, Warren, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Rosetta Key Chapter One Eyeing a thousand musket barrels aimed at one's chest does tend to force consideration of whether the wrong path has been taken. So I did consider it, each muzzle bore looking as wide as the bite of a mongrel stray in a Cairo alley. But no, while I'm modest to a fault, I have my self-righteous side as well--and by my light it wasn't me but the French army that had gone astray. Which I could have explained to my former friend, Napoleon Bonaparte, if he hadn't been up on the dunes out of hailing distance, aloof and annoyingly distracted, his buttons and medals gleaming in the Mediterranean sun. The first time I'd been on a beach with Bonaparte, when he landed his army in Egypt in 1798, he told me the drowned would be immortalized by history. Now, nine months later outside the Palestinian port of Jaffa, history was to be made of me . French grenadiers were getting ready to shoot me and the hapless Muslim captives I'd been thrown in with, and once more I, Ethan Gage, was trying to figure out a way to sidestep destiny. It was a mass execution, you see, and I'd run afoul of the general I once attempted to befriend. How far we'd both come in nine brief months! I edged behind the biggest of the wretched Ottoman prisoners I could find, a Negro giant from the Upper Nile who I calculated might be just thick enough to stop a musket ball. All of us had been herded like bewildered cattle onto a lovely beach, eyes white and round in the darkest faces, the Turkish uniforms of scarlet, cream, emerald, and sapphire smeared with the smoke and blood of a savage sacking. There were lithe Moroccans, tall and dour Sudanese, truculent pale Albanians, Circassian cavalry, Greek gunners, Turkish sergeants--the scrambled levies of a vast empire, all humbled by the French. And me, the lone American. Not only was I baffled by their babble; they often couldn't understand each other. The mob milled, their officers already dead, and their disorder a defeated contrast to the crisp lines of our executioners, drawn up as if on parade. Ottoman defiance had enraged Napoleon--you should never put the heads of emissaries on a pike--and their hungry numbers as prisoners threatened to be a crippling drag on his invasion. So we'd been marched through the orange groves to a crescent of sand just south of the captured port, the sparkling sea a lovely green and gold in the shallows, the hilltop city smoldering. I could see some green fruit still clinging to the shot-blown trees. My former benefactor and recent enemy, sitting on his horse like a young Alexander, was (through desperation or dire calculation) about to display a ruthlessness that his own marshals would whisper about for many campaigns to come. Yet he didn't even have the courtesy to pay attention! He was reading another of his moody novels, his habit to devour a book's page, tear it out, and pass it back to his officers. I was barefoot, bloody, and only forty miles as the crow flies from where Jesus Christ had died to save the world. The past several days of persecution, torment, and warfare hadn't persuaded me that our Savior's efforts had entirely succeeded in improving human nature. "Ready!" A thousand musket hammers were pulled back. Napoleon's henchmen had accused me of being a spy and a traitor, which was why I'd been marched with the other prisoners to the beach. And yes, circumstance had given a grain of truth to that characterization. But I hadn't set out with that intent, by any means. I'd simply been an American in Paris, whose tentative knowledge of electricity--and the need to escape an utterly unjust accusation of murder--resulted in my being included in the company of Napoleon's scientists, or savants, during his dazzling conquest of Egypt the year before. I'd also developed a knack for being on the wrong side at the wrong time. I'd taken fire from Mameluke cavalry, the woman I loved, Arab cutthroats, British broadsides, Muslim fanatics, French platoons--and I'm a likable man! My latest French nemesis was a nasty scoundrel named Pierre Najac, an assassin and thief who couldn't get over the fact that I'd once shot him from beneath the Toulon stage when he tried to rob me of a sacred medallion. It's a long story, as an earlier volume will attest. Najac had come back into my life like a bad debt, and had kept me marching in the prisoner rank with a cavalry saber at my back. He was anticipating my imminent demise with the same feeling of triumph and loathing that one has when crushing a particularly obnoxious spider. I was regretting that I hadn't aimed a shave higher and two inches to the left. As I've remarked before, it all seems to start with gambling. Back in Paris, it had been a card game that won me the mysterious medallion and started the trouble. This time, what had seemed a simple way to get a new start--taking the bewildered seamen of HMS Dangerous for every shilling they had before the British put me ashore in the Holy Land--had solved nothing and, it could be argued, had actually led to my present predicament. Let me repeat: gambling is a vice, and it is foolish to rely on chance. "Aim!" But I'm getting ahead of myself. I, Ethan Gage, have spent most of my thirty-four years trying to keep out of too much trouble and away from too much work. As my mentor and onetime employer, the late, great Benjamin Franklin, would no doubt observe, these two ambitions are as at odds as positive and negative electricity. The pursuit of the latter, no work, is almost sure to defeat the former, no trouble. But that's a lesson, like the headache that follows alcohol or the treachery of beautiful women, forgotten as . . . The Rosetta Key . Copyright © by William Dietrich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Rosetta Key by William Dietrich All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.