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Title: Disappointing Second Outing for Malarkey
Review: Her earlier novel, An Obvious Enchantment, was a gem set mostly in Zanzibar, but Resurrection is a disappointing re-hash of the literary thriller ground. Though it is set in Egypt, Malarkey's descriptions of Cairo's geography and history in the late 1940s should have been fact checked. (For example, she refers to the "Oberai" hotel. This hotel near the pyramids is now called the Mena House Oberoi and is part of a the Indian Oberoi chain. The Oberois didn't have anything to do with it before the 1970s or so.) My sense is that she has visited Egypt but doesn't know the country well enough to place a novel there convincingly. And finally, Wilton Barnhardt wrote an excellent, excellent book, Gospel, on this very topic about ten years ago. Read that instead.
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