1895. Former Scotland Yard detective Daniel Wilson, famous for working the notorious Jack the Ripper case, and his archaeologist sidekick Abigail Fenton are summoned to investigate the murder of a young woman at the Manchester Museum. Though staff remember the woman as a recent and regular visitor, no one appears to know her and she has no possessions from which to identify her.When the pair arrive, the case turns more deadly when the body of a second woman is discovered hidden in the depths of the museum. Seeking help from a local journalist, Daniel hopes to unravel this mystery, but the journey to the truth is fraught with obstacles and the mistakes of the past will not be forgotten ...

Little is known about Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen whose name means “a beautiful woman has come.” She was the wife of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who ushered in the dramatic Amarna Age, and she bore him at least six children. She played a prominent role in political and religious affairs, but after Akhenaten’s death she apparently vanished and was soon forgotten. Yet Nefertiti remains one of the most famous and enigmatic women who ever lived. Her instantly recognizable face adorns a variety of modern artifacts, from expensive jewelry to cheap postcards, t-shirts, and bags, all over the world. She has appeared on page, stage, screen, and opera. In Britain, one woman has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on plastic surgery in hope of resembling the long-dead royal. This enduring obsession is the result of just one object: the lovely and mysterious Nefertiti bust, created by the sculptor Thutmose and housed in Berlin’s Neues Museum since before World War II. In Nefertiti’s Face, Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley tells the story of the bust, from its origins in a busy workshop of the late Bronze Age to its rediscovery and controversial removal to Europe in 1912 and its present status as one of the world’s most treasured artifacts. This wide-ranging history takes us from the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt to wartime Berlin and engages the latest in Pharaonic scholarship. Tyldesley sheds light on both Nefertiti’s life and her improbable afterlife, in which she became famous simply for being famous.

Following an introduction on Egypt's Predynastic Period, cosmetic palettes in general, methodology, and the origins of the Manchester Egyptian collection, this volume brings together every Predynastic cosmetic palette in the museum, providing details on type, dimensions, provenance, date and context, along with a description and bibliography. This data is then analysed according to provenance, type, date, acquisition source and context, followed by illustrations of specific graves and a full bibliography. Photographs of the palettes are then provided.

"Recalling the short-lived Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes of 1924-1925 - part information centre and 'public relations' office, and part surrealist archive - Mark Dion has trawled the Manchester Museum's own collections and found the raw material for this book and a new installation in the museum. Museums' attempts to classify and present the world in miniature inevitably mean that much of their collections are forgotten and marginalized. Renowned for his work exploring taxonomy, archaeology and ecology, Mark Dion, in his Bureau documents his opportunistic encounters with the Museum of Manchester's neglected drawers and overlooked recesses that are home to redundant labels, orphaned mounts, defunct teaching models, botanical freaks, Egyptian fakes and the minutiae that have fallen through the cracks of museum practice and lain abandoned. Dion's Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy is both a repository for the detritus of museum life and a working process, classifying the museum's un-classifiable whilst exploring the bureaucratic workings of the institution." [Publisher's statement].