Sand Scarab

In November 2014 three American friends (two are best-selling Mystery novelists, one gay; the third a youthful painter, also gay) book a 3-week trip to post-Arab Spring Egypt and a cruise on Lake Nasser with Nile Currents, a British tour company. Fellow travelers include a Ukrainian ballet-dancing couple (one gay), an odd Jewish husband and wife from Chicago, twin-sister survivors of the Holocaust and a colorful assortment of Brits. In Cairo they cross paths with four Americans on another tour, Now Voyager, one of whom is a gay ex-Jesuit university professor, another an African-American physician traveling with his teenage daughter. In Luxor the Nile Currents Americans (and Ukrainians) fatefully befriend a young Egyptian -- who looks like the famous gold mask of King Tut -- working at the Winter Palace hotel, the youngest son of a clan of homophobic Muslim Brotherhood extremists -- who kidnap, hold hostage and torture the American painter and Ukrainian principal dancer, but eventually free them. En route on the Nile to Aswan from Luxor, both cruise ships carrying the two different tour groups are fired upon from shore by snipers, with one grisly fatality. At Aswan -- where there are additional misadventures -- everyone (including the Egyptian terrorists) boards the MS Empress Josephine, a luxury cruise vessel, to sail the Nubian Sea to Abu Simbel. Among the ship's passengers are the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, his wife and their Marine bodyguards, who are traveling to dedicate a new Abu Simbel Museum, with the President of Egypt in attendance. During that ceremony one terrorist brother strikes, with unforeseen tragic consequences.