The Shabti

A stage psychic agrees to investigate an Egyptologist’s very real haunting in this fiction debut by Egyptologist Lorenz. Combining her academic expertise with a direct, unpretentious prose style and believable characters makes for an engaging listen enhanced by Matt Haynes’s distinct voices. While his narration can be breathy, Haynes creates consistent portrayals of the increasingly smitten Professor Hermann Goschalk and Dashiel Quicke, the former spiritualist he turns to for help. Dashiel Quick knows all the tricks to duping a human audience, but the angry ghost linked to an ancient funerary urn (a shabti) would be more than he’d care to handle if only Hermann didn’t have such faith in him. Setting a gay love story in the 1930s could suggest tragedy to come, but apart from one obsessive ex-boyfriend, the two encounter no threats predicated on their sexuality, only the anxieties of midlife romance. A good choice for listeners who loved last year’s audiobook Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk and fans of Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody historical mysteries.