Orem Library

For millennia, Egypt has depended upon the waters of the Nile. Its annual floods fertilize the land. By the time the British control Egypt, the Cairo Barrage is the key to control, its name taken from the French term meaning a dam or irrigation channel, designed to increase a river's depth or to divert flow. An attempt to blow up the Manufiyah regulator in the Barrage is not a petty matter. Gareth Owen, the Chief of Cairo's Secret Police, is hurriedly...

The murder of an Italian man in backstreet 1912 Cairo spells trouble for Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, British Chief of Cairo's Secret Police, as he uncovers a possible ethnic cleansing plot and a hidden cache of weapons.

It's World War I. Britain's shadow government, headed by its Agent and Consul General under the nominal authority of Egypt's hereditary ruler the Khedive, has ruled Egypt since 1881. The head of the Secret Police is the Mamur Zapt, an office currently held by a Welshman, Captain Gareth Cadwallader Owen. And as the clouds of the war further darken Egypt's sun-lit skies, he has his hands full. On the professional front, there's all that commotion that...