Friday Finds is a weekly meme hosted at Should Be Reading where bloggers share books that they have heard about or discovered.
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I only have one book to share and that is Napoleon’s Pyramids by William Dietrich. It is the first in the Ethan Gage Series. Below is the plot summary from the author’s website:
Revolutionary France, 1798. American adventurer Ethan Gage, gambler, sharpshooter, and pupil of the late Franklin, wins a mysterious medallion in a card game. Within hours he is framed with a prostitute’s murder and in flight to join Napoleon’s secret invasion of Egypt, enlisted with a promise to unlock the secrets of the Great Pyramid.
Accompanying Napoleon’s military force are 167 scientists and engineers who will be the first Europeans to study the ruins of ancient Egypt. Gage is admitted to this company of “savants” because of his medallion and knowledge of electricity, learned from Benjamin Franklin. Did some mysterious force aid erection of the pyramids? Did the pharaohs learn the secrets of living forever? Even as he hurtles into war, Gage is pursued by shadowy enemies who seem determined to get the baffling medallion, and the powers it could unlock, at all costs. In a race against time and terrain, the world’s fate is at stake.
The story is populated by rich characters: the opportunistic journalist Talma with his Masonic theories of the mysterious east, the great French savants Monge and Berthollet, the beautiful Astiza with her hidden past, the French-Italian duelist and nobleman Alessandro Silano, the Arab mercenary Achmed Bin Sadr, the Mameluke companion Ashraf, and towering above them all the young, fiercely ambitious, and charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte.
This is a novel of huge battles, mathematical pyramid mysteries, a smoldering love story, perilous escapes, and the first great modern clash of West and East. It is all based on real history. Napoleon’s expedition – his attempt to carve out an empire in Asia – gave birth to the science of Egyptology.
Ethan Gage is a rootless adventurer who finds purpose with a woman he must save, and who will save him. Eyewitness to the Battle of the Pyramids and the Battle of the Nile, explorer of the Great Pyramid, and journeyer to a distant temple, he must decipher the medallion and find what even the ancients thought must forever be hidden.
