The Great War has ended and Gareth Cadwallader Owen, who has spent his career defusing political time bombs, learns from his agents, some Greek and some Egyptian, that the streets of Cairo have been made dangerous by threats of real bombs. The first order of business is to ward them off. The second is to insure the safety of an impending major European delegation to the capital. What does it all have to do with Owen's shiny new motor car?

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder Two mysteries of the kind John Bude does best, with well-drawn and authentic period settings and a satisfying whodunit structure, following the traditional rules and style of the Golden Age of the genre. Death in White Pyjamas: At the country home of Sam Richardson, a group of actors have gathered along with their somewhat sinister producer Basil Barnes, and a playwright whose star is rising...

When a Frenchman vanishes during the bustling afternoon tea on the terrace at Shepheard's Hotel, Police Captain Owen can scarcely believe the gentleman has been kidnapped. There must be dozens of witnesses, but they remain as silent as the Sahara sands. Someone, Owen thinks, is silencing witnesses-someone who is concealing a dangerous conspiracy.

The world is changing around the Mamur Zapt, British Chief of Cairo's Secret Police. It's 1912 and there's a war on that no one's heard of. When an Italian man is murdered in the city's back streets, there is concern that this could be some kind of ethnic cleansing. "One of us" Morelli may have been, but was he "one of us" enough? And were the guns in his warehouse anything to do with it? Gareth Owen - the Mamur Zapt - has to find out fast. And then,...

Why was the body put on the line? Chance? Or did someone want to halt the progress of the new electric railway out from Cairo to the city of Pleasure being built in the suburbs?

Mr. Colthorpe Hartley disappears and Monsieur Moulin also disappeared. No one has actually seen either victim vanish. Owen had better unravel it quickly and where better place to start from than the donkey-vous beneath the terrace, home of Cairo's humble but enterprising youths who hire out donkeys for photographs.

In colonial Egypt, Captain Garth Owen of the British police investigates the drowning of a woman from the yacht of a local prince, his work hampered by the disappearance of her body, as well as political considerations.