The Murder of Tutankhamen by Bob Brier (Phoenix, £7.99 in UK)

Tutankhamen (the original "King Tut") died at 18 or 19 years old, and the discovery of his tomb by Howard Carter was one of the great coups of 20th-century Egyptology. The remarkable tomb furniture, including his sarchophagi, has toured the world and attracted millions to see it. For a long time there has been a suggestion that he died a violent death, a theory given support by certain marks on his skull. Brier, a medical doctor, suggests that he was murdered by his scheming vizier, Aye, who then married the Pharaoh's young widow - of whom nothing more is heard in history. The thesis is not new, but it seems highly plausible, and certainly Tutankhamen and his wife were expunged from official records and inscriptions as though they had never existed.