Cairo Gambit

Name: Cairo Gambit
Rating: 4.14 (724 reviews)

by S. W. Perry

First published 2025

Amazon

4.1(724)

Cairo, 1938. Prim Nevenden travels to Egypt after the disappearance of her estranged father Archie, an amateur archaeologist, theatre impresario and man whom British officials suspect may be considering defection. She has not seen him for nearly fifteen years, but the search forces her to reconstruct a life he largely kept from her. Harry Taverner presents himself as a British Council employee, yet his interest in Archie and his knowledge of the case quickly reveal that his official identity is only part of the story.

As Prim and Harry follow the traces Archie has left through Cairo, the missing-person inquiry opens into espionage and overlapping conspiracies at a moment when Europe is moving steadily towards another war. Perry uses the cosmopolitan world of late-1930s Egypt—archaeology, expatriate society and British political influence—as more than a backdrop: it is a place where imperial interests, private loyalties and international intelligence networks intersect. The novel also gives Harry Taverner, familiar from Berlin Duet, an earlier case in the increasingly unstable world of 1938.