A good salary and an all-expenses-paid summer spent a sprawling Arizona ranch is too good a deal for fledgling anthropologist D. J. Abbott to turn downтАФespecially when it's six hundred miles from home. What does it matter that her rich new employer and benefactor, Hank Hunnicutt, is a certified oddball who is presently funding all manner of off-beat projects, from alien conspiracy studies to a hunt for dragon bones? There's even talk of treasure buried in the nearby mountains, but D. J. isn't going to allow loose speculationтАФor the considerable charms of handsome professional treasure hunter Jesse FranklinтАФto sidetrack her. Then Hunnicutt suffers a mysterious accident and vanishes, leaving the weirdos gathered at his spread to eye each other with frightened suspicion.
But on a high-desert search for the missing millionaire, D. J. is learning things that may not be healthy for her to know. The game someone is playing here goes far beyond the rational universeтАФand it could leave D. J. legitimately dead.
Elizabeth Peters earned her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of ChicagoтАЩs famed Oriental Institute. During her fifty-year career, she wrote more than seventy novels and three nonfiction books on Egypt. She received numerous writing awards and, in 2012, was given the first Amelia Peabody Award, created in her honor. She died in 2013, leaving a partially completed manuscript of The Painted Queen.
Grace Conlin (1962тАУ1997) was the recording name of Grainne Cassidy, an award-winning actress and acclaimed narrator. She was a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC, and won a Helen Hayes Award in 1988 for her role in Woolly MammothтАЩs production of Savage in Limbo.