Books › Death Comes as the End
Death Comes as the End
428 pages
A claustrophobic domestic thriller where ancient sun-baked walls offer no protection from the timeless poison of family greed.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like watching the slow-motion collapse of a seemingly perfect facade. Despite the ancient Egyptian setting, the atmosphere is intensely claustrophobic and deeply familiar, rooted in the timeless toxicity of family jealousy and greed. The pace is steady, methodically tightening the screws as a household turns in on itself, trading sun-baked domesticity for creeping paranoia. The prose is characteristically unadorned and dialogue-driven, focusing sharply on the psychological friction between siblings and spouses rather than getting bogged down in historical world-building. It delights readers who love a locked-room mystery but crave the juicy, suffocating tension of a domestic drama, proving that human nature—and the capacity for murder—remains chillingly constant across millennia.
- Mood
- claustrophobic
- sun-baked
- paranoid
- tense
- Tone
- observant
- cynical
- suspenseful
- detached
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- family dysfunction · corrupting power of greed · facade of respectability · timelessness of human nature
- The writing
- Direct, unadorned, and dialogue-heavy, prioritizing psychological friction over lush historical detail.
- The arc
- Moves from uneasy domestic normalcy into suffocating paranoia, culminating in a shocking but inevitable resolution.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love the suffocating tension of a locked-room mystery combined with the bitter rivalries of a toxic family drama.
Content notes
- murder
- poisoning
- domestic abuse
- family violence
About the book
It is 2000 BC in Egypt and Imhotep the Ka-Priest brings home his beautiful young concubine Nofret. But not all the members of his family welcome her. When she is found dead Imhotep's daughter, Renisenb, suspects it might not have been an accident. The death unleashes the greed and hate that have been building up within the family and the horrific events that follow tear it apart.This is Christie's only book with a historical setting. The idea of setting a murder mystery novel in Egypt was suggested to her by Stephen Glanville a noted Egyptologist and close personal friend and colleague of Christie's husband Max Mallowan.
Description from Open Library.
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