FIONA DAVIS' The Stolen Queen

Bestselling author Fiona Davis is beloved for her captivating novels featuring iconic New York City landmarks. Her latest, The Stolen Queen, begins at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978 before taking readers to Egypt in the 1930s. Here, part 2 of our exclusive preview reveals what Charlotte may have discovered

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A COMPELLING PAGE-TURNER

The Stolen Queen is available now for pre-order at Amazon.​com. On sale January 7!

CHAPTER ONE/NEW YORK CITY, 1978

Charlotte paused in front of one of her favorite depictions of the female pharaoh Hathorkare in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a fragment of a statue known as the Cerulean Queen. While many of the other figures from Egypt were made of limestone or red granite with a rough finish, the Cerulean Queen was made of finely polished lapis lazuli. The only remnant of the statue was a tantalizing fragment of the lower portion of its head, consisting of the cheeks, the chin and a large portion of the lips. And what lips they were: beautifully curved and utterly sensuous. The lips of Hathorkare. If the rest of the statue came anywhere close to being as beautiful as the lips, it must have been a sight to behold. Charlotte wondered how it came to be smashed. Was it accidentally dropped while being moved from one location to another? Or did someone take a hammer to it on orders from Saukemet II? The thought was too awful to contemplate.

The fragment was small, only around five inches across. It had been found at the turn of the twentieth century, by a British earl who fancied himself something of an Egyptologist, in a trash heap containing destroyed statues of Hathorkare, just outside her temple. Nearby had lain a broken slab of lime stone with a warning that translated to “Anyone who removes an object dear to Hathorkare outside of the boundaries of the kingdom will face the wrath of the gods.”

The earl was killed in a hunting accident two weeks after bringing the Cerulean Queen to his estate in Hampshire. His widow quickly sold it off to the Met and died less than a month later choking on a gumdrop.