Easy. Bad writing and editing.
Despite the amount of on-site research Patterson claims to have done, or had an assistant do, the story as presented by Patterson is bare bones. After seeing the King Tut exhibit in Denver I can say it doesn't take a murder mystery novelist to figure out that the teenaged Tut was probably murdered by the two officials who succeeded him. Since the discovery of Tut's tomb, there have been rumors of murder, as no doubt there were in his very day. Current day CT scans and MRIs of his mummy have added to the controversy.
The most interesting detail in MOKT was the letter written to Egypt's ancient enemy Hittite king by Tut's widow/oldersister, Ankhesenpaaten., "Send me one of your sons and I will make him Pharaoh." Of course, the Hittite prince Zannanza was murdered at the border by the aforementioned general Horemheb. On this basis Patterson speculates that she was part of the conspiracy to murder her husband.
Ankhesenpaaten, though a ruling Pharoah after Tut's death, was forced to marry the vizier Aye, her husband's murderer, as she was the one with the royal blood who had legitimized Tut. Patterson guesses that soon after she married Aye, he murdered her. Like Tut, she was erased from the formal chronicles of Egypt by their successors. Her existence was revealed to archeologist Howard Carter with the linked names of Ankesenpaaten and Aye on a ceramic wedding/coronation ring sold on the Egyptian black market in the early 19th century. Patterson thinks her body was thrown to the crocodiles, as she was not buried with Tut and their infant daughters, nor was her mummy found in the Valley of the Queens.
Aye and Horem stuffed Tut's mummy into a small unfinished tomb near Amarna, the city in the desert founded by his brilliant and iconoclastic father. Both the tomb and Amarna lay under the sands, safe from tomb robbers until Carter's career-culminating discovery in 1922, celebrated around the world.