Book review: Napoleon's Pyramids by William Dietrich

The 52nd book I read in 2017 was Napoleon's Pyramids, the first book in the Ethan Gage Adventure series by William Dietrich.  I saw a later book in the historical fiction series on sale at Half Price Books but waited until I found the first one, for continuity's sake.

The fictional Ethan Gage is an adventurer with a touch of scoundrel about him, but blurbs comparing him to George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman are greatly exaggerated.  The story opens with Gage, a sometime Freemason once in the employ of Benjamin Franklin, now halfheartedly kicking around revolutionary Paris, ostensibly in search of trade opportunities but mostly gambling and whoring.  After winning an unusual and supposedly cursed medallion in a game of cards, the prostitute with whom he spent the night turns up gutted, and, framed for her murder, Gage quickly joins Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt until the heat is off on the continent.

Comparisons to Indiana Jones are far more on point.  Napoleon is looking to "liberate" Egypt but is also bringing along a team of "savants" to unlock the secrets of the pyramids, a team of which Gage, by merit of his Freemasonry and experience with the new science of electricity, makes a part.  Arriving in the newly-conquered city of Cairo, Gage meets a beautiful priestess, a hearty Mameluke, and a scholar of antiquities, all of whom help Gage decipher the meaning of his mysterious medallion.

Gage plays a bit too much the "dumb Westerner" for my taste, so that his local allies have to overexplain everything they say for the reader's benefit.  Add to that the fact that Dietrich wants to have his cake and eat it, too: Astiza gives a rationalistic explanation of Egyptian religion -- the 'priests' were originally just the people scientific enough to figure out and record the pattern of the Nile's ebb and flow and made up the gods and rituals to cement their own power -- yet also claims to believe in the power and existence of Horus. 

My dislike of the book was cemented by the author's treatment of female characters.  From the initial prostitute whose tortured death impels Gage in the direction of the plot, to Astiza who, despite being Gage's actual property still 'falls in love with him' (based on what character qualities, I'm not sure) and then conveniently drops literally out of the plot at the end to allow him to move on to other adventures (and lovers), they exist entirely as plot devices to motivate the main character, a fellow who, if he never descends to Flashmanlike levels of depravity, similarly fails to impress the reader with his positive qualities.  He's a white American male!  Isn't that enough for him to be the hero?