In The Museum Detective, Maha Khan Phillips returns with a fast-paced archaeological thriller. Set in Karachi, the novel meditates on how both historical and private pasts have been buried but are now being excavated.

Stirred by a real-life antiquities scandal, Phillips introduces readers to Dr Gulfsa ‘Gul’ Delani, a Pakistani classicist and museum curator. Gul is sharp in her scholarship, irreverent in her speech and fearless in combating corruption.

I had the pleasure of interviewing London-based Phillips about this novel. Our dialogue unearthed a writer committed to how stories — especially the stories museums tell — shape the histories of empire, nation and gender relations.

“I was deeply inspired by real-life events,” Phillips explained. “In 2000, police arrested two men who were trying to sell an ancient Persian mummy for 11 million dollars. They claimed they had found a Persian princess, a daughter of King Xerxes.” The case transfixed the international media. It revealed a mummified body inscribed with Achaemenid markings.

This would have rewritten history, since Persia was not known to practise mummification. But when Karachi-based archaeologist Dr Asma Ibrahim discovered the mummy was a modern fake, interest soon waned. Initially fetishised as a historical treasure, once stripped of her royal provenance, the unidentified woman’s body became disposable.

Phillips was disturbed by this: “Imagine a world where women are murdered to be mummified and sold on the black market. Dr Ibrahim cared deeply about the woman’s fate, and I myself was profoundly moved by the relationship between this incredible, whip-smart archaeologist and the unknown woman the world was so quick to forget.” The novel embellishes the premise to ask searching questions about who gets remembered, who is believed and how historical value is assigned.

Gul finds herself caught between personal loss and professional peril. Her niece Mahnaz, a curious student, has gone missing. Gul’s unusually intense materterine mourning is tightly woven into her investigation of the mummy. The narrative layers a gangland plot over the institutional world of heritage management. This is a vehicle for evoking not only family trauma and the politics of preservation but also the fraught role of postcolonial museums. “I’ve always wanted to showcase the remarkable antiquities and heritage sites of Pakistan,” Phillips tells me, “hopefully through gripping, immersive stories.”

Karachi plays a central role. Impossible to contain as a backdrop, the city is alive with contradictions — multicultural and narrow-minded, violent and giving. Gul ambivalently navigates its teeming streets, elite drawing rooms, bureaucratic labyrinths and dusty archives. Her love for the city co-exists with frustration at its injustices. Phillips, who grew up in Karachi, draws from memory but avoids nostalgia. “Living amid rich and vibrant cultures and historical landscapes,” she avers, is as much about recognising loss and exclusion as it is about celebrating beauty.

The discovery of a mummy pulls the tale into historical, religious and geopolitical tensions. Though Phillips previously knew little about the Achaemenid Empire, her research led her down “rabbit holes” of historical fascination. “I took creative liberties, inventing the idea of a ‘Lost Princess’ for the sake of the narrative,” she says. Her passion for the period is palpable. The novel gestures to Pakistan and Iran being bound by a fluid frontier, shaped less by fixed geography than entangled histories. These concern Persianate culture, East India Company incursions and contested imperial borders.

Phillips’ splicing of ancient and modern is distinctive. Her 2016 book The Curse of Mohenjodaro used speculative fiction and fantasy, whereas the new novel is grounded in crime fiction and contemporaneity. Even so, it borrows the suspense and intrigue of historical mysteries.

Phillips is drawn to the Victorian obsession with mummies. She researched this phenomenon in depth, though much of her work didn’t make it into the final book. Still, the influence lingers. There is a gothic undertow to her writing, a sense that the past is not safely locked behind glass but haunts the present.

Museums are depicted as battlegrounds of knowledge, class and greed. Gul works in one, but she is not uncritical of its legacy. She understands that objects move out from display cases to get enlisted in nationalist projects, private markets and global power games. Her professional world is a space where powerful gatekeepers often silence the very voices that most need to be heard. In this feminist novel, Gul constantly negotiates patriarchal institutions, even as she tries to use them to uncover truth and protect the vulnerable.

The personal is political here, too. Gul’s family — particularly her overbearing business magnate brother and his wife — embody a mixture of familiarity and constraint. “Some of the themes I focused on in The Museum Detective will continue to evolve,” Phillips says of her planned series. “From how women navigate misogynistic systems, the pervasive impact of corruption, the sense of being an outsider in your community.”

The emotional register of the novel is varied: it ranges from dry wit (often delivered by the eccentric Mrs Fernandes) to aching grief as Gul realises Mahnaz may never return. Mrs Fernandes, a character who adds comic relief and flashes of wisdom, acts as a foil to Gul’s depressive tendencies. Together, they form part of what Phillips calls “a gang of unlikely misfits”, whose camaraderie lends humanity to a traitorous and combustible environment.

Looking ahead, Phillips says Gul’s adventures are not over. “I’m working on Book 2 as we speak. It’s early days, but I can tell you that she is knee deep in another murder. This time, her adventures take her into exploring the mythologies around reincarnation.” While she’s tight-lipped about further plot details, her determination to embed thrillers within a broader cultural frame is apparent. “Each instalment,” she says, “will focus on some facet of Pakistani folklore or archaeology and be linked to a modern-day crime.”

Phillips has created more than a detective novel. She has opened a conversation about how postcolonial nations grapple with their histories and how women, in particular, must fight to write themselves into the record. The novel insists that every object, every body, carries a story. Recovering those narratives may be dangerous, but it is crucial.

The columnist is a Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and author of five books. Bluesky: @clarachambara

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 18th, 2025