Free e-book: Jane Lindskold’s The Buried Pyramid

Before editors are editors, we are readers.  And as readers, we can get caught up in a writer’s words, works, and worlds, to the point where we set aside whatever we should be reading to indulge our imaginations by grabbing a new work by a favorite writer. 

I first became aware of Jane Lindskold’s work when her first Wolf book, Through Wolf’s Eyes, was published by Tor.  The copy made the book sound intriguing and the cover had a cool-looking wolf on it, and the good reviews were the icing on the cake (since I write and read copy just about every day, it takes more than good cover copy to sell me).  So when the book came out in paperback, I picked it up—I prefer mass market for anything I intend to read on the subway.  Then, like everyone else, I had to wait impatiently for each successive volume to appear.

Luckily, we were publishing others of Jane’s books, so there was more for me to discover.  And as wonderful and compelling as the Wolf series is, I love the changes of pace of Jane’s stand-alone novels.  The kaleidoscope metaphors used in Child of a Rainless Year and that book’s wheels-within-wheels plot made me want to shove it into people’s hands and say, “You will love this.”  Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls made me cry.

And then there was The Buried Pyramid.  I’ve been haunting The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Wing since I was in preschool.  When the first King Tut exhibit came to New York, my mother and I (then age 17) lined up for hours to be able to ogle the objects.  I still have the issues of National Geographic that cover the relocation of Abu Simbel due to the rising waters from the Aswan Dam.  I studied the shift from Amun to Aten and knew who Hatshepsut was.  In other words, I was a bit of an Egypt nut. 

So The Buried Pyramid was right up my alley.  Set in the Victorian age, The Buried Pyramid is, at the start, an archaeological suspense novel.  Jenny Benet, a recently orphaned American who was raised in the Wild West before being “finished” in Boston, goes to Egypt with her uncle, Neville Hawthorne, a prominent British archaeologist.  They’re searching for the legendary Buried Pyramid, the tomb of the pharaoh Neferankhotep—who may also have been Moses the Lawgiver.

Discovering the tomb is not the end of their journey but only the beginning.  In The Buried Pyramid, Jane Lindskold sends us on a marvelous ride through Ancient Egyptian myth, legend, and religion and leaves us enlightened and amazed.  It remains my favorite of Jane’s non-series novels, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.  (You have to be a registered user of Tor.com, and logged in, in order to download this book.)

You can already tell that Jane is far from a one-trick pony.  Even when she writes in series, she never does anything the same way twice.  I’ve moved from just being a reader, to a fan, to Jane’s editor, and I’m really thrilled to announce that Tor has just published Thirteen Orphans, the first book in Jane’s new series, Breaking the Wall.  It’s something else new and different from this talented writer, and I think you’ll love it.