Last Pharaoh

They cut his name from the wall. Somebody wrote it again where nobody would look.The coffin has been in a Cairo storeroom since 1904. Its face has been cut away. Its name has been erased. Both were done in antiquity, carefully, by a trained craftsman who stopped exactly where the text stopped.And on the inside of the lid, on rough wood nobody was ever meant to see, the same name is written again in ink, in a cartouche, by a man who was in a hurry.Dr. Marcus Thorne rules out the dull explanations one by one. The ink isn't modern. Carpenters don't write royal names on production notes. In coffin reuse you erase the old name to write a new one, and here there is no new name. And nobody, in four thousand years of reuse, has ever bothered to destroy a face.Then the tomograph shows that what lies inside is not one man but three.In the shaft the coffin came out of, sealed since 1974, there is ash thirty centimeters deep and soot on the ceiling. The remains of at least five people were burned there for hours by men who carried firewood down a rope so the flames would not be seen from the valley. One coffin was taken out before the fire and put back afterward.From the storerooms of Cairo to a dry wadi near Luxor, from Ottoman permits to the ledger of a forgotten clerk, Thorne works toward a question nobody has yet asked out loud: why would the same hands destroy and preserve on the same night?THE LAST PHARAOH is the third Dr. Marcus Thorne thriller, a standalone archaeological mystery for readers who like their puzzles solved with evidence rather than magic, in the tradition of Daniel Silva, Steve Berry and Preston & Child.No curses. No prophecies. Only people, and the questions they decided not to ask.