The Last Camel Died at Noon is a historical mystery novel by Elizabeth Peters (penname of Barbara Mertz), first published in 1991. It's the sixth book in the Amelia Peabody series and is set in 1897-98.
Viscount Blacktower's son disappeared fourteen years ago in the Sudan, so he's startled to receive a letter from him. He's even more startled to see it contains a map. The viscount asks Amelia and Radcliffe to follow the map and find his son, or at least find out what happened to him. The Emersons refuse, but they find themselves dragged into the search anyway.
Contains examples of:
- Child by Rape: The Emersons meet Mrs. Forth, who believes herself to the the God's Wife of Amon and wants nothing to do with her English identity. Tarek explains that she tried to kill Nefret twice when she was a baby. Amelia suspects postpartum depression. But Emerson speculates that her loathing of the name Forth and attempts to murder Nefret are the result of her father-in-law raping her, and the reason Willie Forth and his wife ended up on the Lost Oasis where they both rejected their former lives.
- Convenient Eclipse: Subverted; an Affectionate Parody of King Solomon's Mines. The Emersons are in a lost civilization and looking to impress the natives. Amelia asks Emerson if a Convenient Eclipse is coming up by any chance, and his response is essentially, "How the Hell would I know? I'm an archaeologist, not an astronomer."
- Did You Die?: The book starts with Amelia, her husband Emerson, and their son Ramses lost in the Nubian desert, several days away from the Nile, after the death of their last camel. There is then an extended flashback to show how they came to be in this situation, which Amelia assures the reader is not for the purposes of causing any suspense about her survival because "Obviously I could not be writing this if I were in the same state as those poor camels."
- Hypocritical Humor: At one point, Amelia pats herself on the back for nagging her husband into a certain course of action. When it goes badly a few pages later, she notes that if he'd listened to her, he would never have taken that course. Apparently, she forgot to edit the relevant portion of her journal.
- Lost World: The book sees the Emersons setting out and discovering a hidden civilization.
- Man-Made House Flood: Amelia gets home from a trip to London to learn that her son Ramses had been about to take a bath when he'd been distracted by his cat catching a mouse, and had neglected to turn off the water, causing both a flood in the bathroom, and a cascade of water coming down from the ceiling into his father's study. Amelia promptly decides that she doesn't want to know any more details, and tells her maid to just give Amelia her whiskey and go away.
