Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters (1988, Paperback, Reissue)

Amelia Peabody inherits a small fortune and with it her independence from her father. Amelia is not a typical Victorian lady as you will soon come to find out. She first takes a trip to Africa, but shortly after her traveling companion becomes ill, she hires Evelyn Barton-Forbes, a beautiful, but penniless young woman. Amelia and Emily end up traveling to Egypt and find themselves at an archaeological dig on the Nile. Amelia narrates most of the book and you will come to love her dry humor and no nonsense ways. This is also where she will meet and marry her husband, the gruff Professor Emerson Peabody, a well-known archeologist. Romance has a rocky road and you will love the banter between them. Amelia is strong willed and this is what Emerson loves about her, he just isn't showing it too well. In fact Amelia thinks he may be in love with the more lady like Emily.

This was a great first start to her stories on Peabody and Emerson and later with son Ramses and his wife and the people in Egypt that become like a family to them and appear in almost all books. The Emerson's can never change one another, but that is what makes the books so good and keeps you coming back to read another.

This is a reread for me of the first of this series of books about a formidable British lady who travels to Egypt at the turn of the 20th century and finds adventure, excitement, and romance while touring the Pyramids. It's a humorous and romantic story and readers fall in love with this feisty Indiana Jones-style adventuress.