If there's one device I've come to hate in literature and on television, it's when a story starts in media res with what will turn out to be the climactic action scene and then rewinds all the way back to the beginning. It's only in the past few years that this device has become almost omnipresent on television, so I was somewhat surprised that Peters uses it at the start of this book. Perhaps it was a new and exciting thing when she did it in 1991. At any rate, I can't blame her too much for this lapse in judgment when the rest of the book is so genuinely exciting. Amelia and Emerson go to an archaeological dig in Sudan instead of their usual Egypt, but they don't get very far with their excavations this time, as they are lured out into the desert on a quest and end up discovering a lost civilization. I'll confess that the usual Egyptian settings of the Peabody stories had seemed a little humdrum to me during the last few books, so it's nice that we had a change of scenery and got to explore a living civilization instead of a dead one this time. All in all, it was a fun read, and as usual, I'm looking forward to the next one!