Pharaoh Tutankhamun orders Lord Meren, his chief investigator, to find our quickly, before power-mad priests use the incident to undermine his royal authority. Everyone is a suspect, for the body belongs to the notorious scribe Hormin, hated by all who knew him. However, Lord Meren is no mere courtier but the Eyes and Ears of the living god. In the terrifying Place of Anubis, where unquiet spirits dwell, in the sunstruck city of Thebes, where Hormin's sons and his beautiful concubine plot, and in the royal court, where intrigues abound, Lord Meren hunts his quarry, peeling back the secrets of nobles and slaves in his quest for the truth. But more important by far is Meren's responsibility to protect the young Pharaoh from his enemies - who are no farther away than the length of a dagger....

When a priest dies in a mysterious fall from atop a statue of Tutankhamun, many consider the death a fateful one for the fourteen-year-old pharaoh and his reign. Indeed, the Hittites are already at Egypt's borders, and the enemies of the late heretic pharaoh Akhenaten have transferred their implacable hatred to the young pharaoh. Concealed by the luxury of the court at Thebes lie viciousness, evil, and murder. Not even Lord Meren - the confidential inquiry agent who must see to the boy king's safety – can name the master plotters. But until the enemies of the living god are destroyed, neither his body nor his soul is safe from their deadly poison....

The small group gathered at Lord Meren's country house to celebrate his homecoming is soon to become yet smaller. Beautiful Anhai, Meren's cousin-in-law, falls victim to murder - an act of violence as inscrutable as the sphinx. True, she had myriad lovers and a scorpion tongue, but why was her body arranged so meticulously, as if for sleep? The most dreadful possibility is that the crime has to do with Lord Meren's awesome undercover mission for the pharaoh, for which his feast of rejoicing is in part of cover. This mission cannot, must not, fail. Ruthlessly stripping bare the deepest secrets of the nest of cobras who are his nearest relatives, Meren finds the thread that leads to the truth and the unmasking of a shocking crime in the court of the living god....

EATER OF SOULS

Someone-or something-is slaying innocent persons on the night streets in the royal city of Memphis. Frightened citizens believe it is the gruesome work of the Devourer, the eater of souls, one of the most fearsome gods in the Egyptian pantheon. Even Lord Meren, the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh, is baffled by this series of horrific crimes whose victims have only one thing in common: the grisly manner of their deaths. Is the evildoer truly the Devourer, risen from the netherworld, or a mere mortal? Between Lord Meren and the truth lie dangerous mysteries-in the city's back alleys and in the bosom of his own noble family....

Amid the ongoing and disturbingly hushed investigation of the murder of Queen Nafertiti, the pharaoh's trusted advisor Lord Meren is suddenly called away to investigate the bizarre death of the pharaoh's favorite groom, Senna. Although three men have already been implicated, Meren senses a greater evil at work – but when his personal honor is comprised by court intrigue and botched raid against Libyan border bandits, Meren is sentenced to death. In a fierce political battle to save his life - and his name - Lord Meren is about to discover the very enemies who are undermining his place at court.

A teenager on the great throne of Egypt is a dangerous thing. Tempted by debauchery, unbalanced by the murders that put him in power, King Tut is being driven mad by the question of who killed his beloved foster mother, Nefertiti." "Lord Meren is Tutankhamun's last hope. The detective and master spy is barely recovered from wounds received when he discovered who had administered the poison to the kingdom's adored queen - but not the evil mastermind behind the crime. Now he sees an imminent darkness consuming the world he knows, a conspiracy of such magnitude that the harmony and future of Egypt is threatened." "Joining with the astonishing woman warrior Anath, a.k.a. the Eyes of Babylon, Meren soon realizes that the one remaining witness to Nefertiti's murder is her old bodyguard, still alive in the up-river city of Syene. Sailing away from the majestic capital of Memphis, Meren begins a journey into a land awash in peril. For in a titanic clash of old ways and new, former gods and a new religion, a fanatical enemy is cunning and evil enough to plan the murder of a pharaoh - and waits for the right moment to destroy a glittering, incomparable world.