In the final volume of her Lords of the Two Lands trilogy, Pauline Gedge once again brings to life the majesty and cinematic glamour of ancient Egypt. The Horus Road concludes her story of the Taos, the remnants of a native Egyptian royal family. They mounted a brutal but ultimately successful revolution to reclaim the throne of Egypt from the Setiu, an eastern race who moved quietly into the Nile Delta, then methodically infiltrated Egypt’s government and installed their own people as monarchs.

The concluding volume begins with the coronation of the last male Tao, Prince Ahmose. With memories of the father, brothers, and sister already sacrificed to the struggle haunting him, he takes his army north to Het-Uart, the Setiu royal city, to bring it down once and for all. Meanwhile, his mother, grandmother, and wife, who are as formidable as the family’s men, begin rebuilding their power base in the south.

The Horus Road works quite well as a stand-alone novel, though those who haven’t read the trilogy’s previous books (The Hippopotamus Marsh and The Oasis) will undoubtedly want to seek them out to flesh out the tantalizing references to earlier events in the opening chapters. Gedge’s account of the siege of Het-Uart is gripping, bold, and bloody, and gives the reader a good dose of action to balance the middle part of the novel, which details the family’s struggles to consolidate their new administration and reunite Egypt under their rule.

All Gedge’s Egypt novels are based on painstaking research, but they never read like dry history lessons or shout. “Look how much work I put into this.” It’s as though she had walked among her characters and watched them in action rather than reading other people’s sketchy accounts of their deeds. Her prose is spare but graceful, and she can make the menu of a royal meal as compelling as an epic battle scene.