The Dead Sea Cipher by Elizabeth Peters, for the #1970Club

In this romantic suspense novel, a young woman on a trip to the Holy Land finds herself in danger and does not know who she can trust or even who her pursuers really are. Dinah Van der Lyn is an aspiring opera singer who is about to get her big break – filling in for a pregnant soprano at a small opera company in Germany. Well, she knows it is more of a little break, so maybe that’s why she is in no hurry to get there. 

Geography is not my strong point but on what seems like a strangely-not-very-convenient-way to her new gig, she begins a solo trip to the Middle East, mostly to fulfill the dream of her father, a wheelchair-bound minister whose expertise is the lands of the Bible. Dinah is staying at a hotel in Beirut with thin walls when she overhears an argument in Arabic, then the word, “Help!” and she rushes into the hallway instead of sensibly calling the front desk. When a handsome man appears, she assumes he is a hotel employee and tells him what she heard but he is surprisingly skeptical:

“I wonder,” the man went on, “how you recognized a call for help. You understand Arabic?”
“He called in English.”
“Did he really?”
“Yes, he . . . ” Dinah stopped. She was getting angry, and it cleared away her confusion.
“You needn’t believe me if you don’t want to,” she said. “I couldn’t care less. Just keep those drunkards quiet so I can sleep. Good night.”

Another man, but not as good looking (this seems to make him more trustworthy later on), accosts her while she is sightseeing at the ancient ruins of Byblos, but Dinah finds his angry questions incomprehensible and dodges him.

She can’t avoid the police, who await her at the hotel to tell her she likely overheard a man being murdered in the room next door. They are suspicious of her (why don’t they ask why an opera singer booked in Germany is in the Holy Land?) but they don’t prevent Dinah from beginning her scheduled special tour that will take her to historical places in the Middle East, with Jerusalem as the ultimate destination. It turns out that the murdered man thought he’d found a new book of the Dead Sea Scrolls and everyone is after it. The two men doggedly following Dinah: handsome Cartwright, a spy, who – surprise – does not work for the hotel, and scruffy archeologist, Jeff Smith, both pursue Dinah because they think she must have heard where the dead man hid his amazing find, if it exists.  Just because she picked up a few words of Arabic from the chambermaid does not mean she'd be able to understand an argument, however.

“I planned to do some sight-seeing,” she said resignedly. “All the way across the Atlantic, across Europe . . . . Here I stand in the ruins of ancient Baalbek, and what have I got? You. But it might be worth is if I could get rid of you once and for all. What is it you want?”

You probably guessed that not only does outspoken Dinah have the two quite different men pursuing her but she also has to decide which one to trust, if she wants to make it to page 238.

It is surreal to read a light-hearted romantic mystery in which the heroine starts out as a carefree tourist in Beirut when a typical headline these days is “Beirut rocked by fresh Israeli air strikes.” A lot has happened in the Middle East since 1970 and none of it good! Much of the book reads as a travelogue of biblical places author Barbara Mertz (who used Elizabeth Peters as her pseudonym for mysteries) wants her armchair traveler readers to appreciate, with a little romantic suspense thrown in, which I found predictable and somewhat disappointing overall. She wrote from 1964 to 2008, so this is one of her earlier books and seems influenced by Mary Stewart, but does not have Stewart’s dimension or humor, although Dinah has some sassy moments (and even tore up her slip for a bandage at one point like Nicola in The Moon-Spinners (1962) – now that no one wears slips, how will one stanch wounds in a crisis? Perhaps this is a more dated reference than sightseeing in Beirut!). 

Still, Mertz/Peters, an Egyptologist, knew her material even if her delivery was disappointing in this standalone. I don’t think I ever read any of Peters’ best known series about Amelia Peabody or the gothics she wrote as Barbara Michaels but The Dead Sea Cipher seemed like a good choice for Simon and Karen’s 1970 Club.  Have you read any books by this popular author?

This is also book 27 for Carol’s Cloak and Dagger Challenge.

Publication: HarperCollins, ebook, originally published in 1970
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Source: Library/Hoopla