David Gibbins\' Pharaoh a tense journey into the Nile

I\'m probably going to ruffle a few feathers here, but I\'ve never been a Dan Brown fan. Thus, I did not show much enthusiasm to read Pharaoh when it was described on the back as \"The Da Vinci Code of the deep sea\". But I enjoyed David Gibbins\'s novel. And how. The story begins in 1351BC with Akhenaten, the Sun-Pharaoh, disappearing beneath the sands of the Great Pyramids of Giza. On to AD1884, when a British soldier serving in Sudan comes across the remains of a submerged temple showing signs of human sacrifice. Present day, and Jack Howard and his archaeology team are on the trail of the mystery, diving into the Nile in a bid to discover the truth behind the Sun-Pharaoh\'s disappearance. The deeper the team dived, the more I became engrossed. It was Gordon of Khartoum\'s period I found most fascinating. Gibbins\'s description of the battle scenes are horrific - \"Another officer with a knuckleduster grasped a dervish in a headlock and punched his nose upwards so that it shattered into the man\'s brain\" - it was often a relief to get back to the relative peace of modern day.