Jaws of the Nile: A 1930s Egypt Creature-Feature Adventure
Egypt, August 1934. The Nile has become the hunting grounds for a monstrous crocodile. Is it merely a savage beast or is it an angry god?
Mark Denton has spent fifteen years killing man-eating crocodiles on three continents. He knows how they hunt, how they feed, and how they die. Then the Ministry sends him to a drowned village south of Kom Ombo, where six bodies lie in a shed with their hands and feet sheared clean off and nothing eaten, and the tracks in the mud measure twenty-two inches across.
Nothing about it is right. The animal bleeds black. Bullets do nothing. It takes its victims from three families only, and it is growing. Aisha Youssef of the Antiquities Service knows why. Six weeks ago, grave robbers blasted open a Roman-era tomb in the Eastern Desert that the village was built to guard. Inside lay a sorcerer-priest of the crocodile god, bound in 30 BC with iron, fire, and the blood of the men who betrayed him. The lullaby the village grandmothers still sing is half of the ritual that held him. The other half is in Latin, hidden in a shrine sixty feet under the Aswan reservoir. And the one object that can bind him again has been sold to a Cairo collector who thinks he has bought a weapon.
With a Nubian river pilot who can hold her breath for two and a half minutes, an elderly papyrologist with bad knees, and a fisherman who wants only to say his dead brother's name to the thing that took him, Denton and Aisha have until the flood crests to recover the pieces, learn the words, and light seven fires on the riverbank. Behind them comes a desert gunrunner who has read their telegrams and lost two fingers inside that tomb. Ahead waits a river that never belonged to man.
A pulp adventure in the classic tradition. For readers of lost-tomb archaeology thrillers, creature-feature horror, and historical action set in the age of steamers and Lee-Enfields.
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