About this item
A Greek American tourist, Lydia Pappas, stumbles upon a child's body in the ruins of an ancient temple, well hidden on the top of a cliff. The boy has been bled dry, though no blood is in evidence, leading the Greek police investigator, Yiannis Patronas, to believe the killer must have collected it. Greece's financial crisis has reduced the police force on Sifnos to one officer, Petros Nikolaidis, so Patronas has been summoned from his home base of Chios to aid in the case. Accompanying him are his colleagues, Giorgos Tembelos and Evangelos Demos, as well as Papa Michalis, an ancient Orthodox priest with a vast knowledge of detective fiction and an uncanny ability to ferret out the truth. Though eccentric and often irritating, Michalis has been an asset to Patronas over the years in a land where homicide was, until recently, a rare occurrence.
About the Author
The daughter of an itinerant scientist, I was born in Wisconsin, spent the first years of my life in San Diego, before moving to Washington, D.C. when NASA was created and my father went to work for that agency. A genuine rocket scientist, he served there for twenty-five years in many capacities - Director of Unmanned Space, Director of Astronomy, Associate Administrator and Chief Scientist, and supervised the American missions to Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. Our house was always littered with models of space ships and missiles and our guests at Thanksgiving spoke about 'thrust and payload' in a multitude of tongues, it being my father's firm belief that the language of American science was 'broken English. 'I attended Wells College in upstate New York for two years before transferring to George Washington University in Washington, DC where I graduated with a degree in political science and Russian studies, my focus being on Dostoyevsky, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. I worked at the Washington Post while in college, writing obituaries and doing research for the national desk, before leaving to join the staff of the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau. Following my marriage to a Greek national, Philip Serafim, I moved to Athens where I taught art while at home with small children, my daughers, Amalia and Annie. When we moved back to the United States seven years later, I wrote for the local papers and sporadically for the Boston Globe. My mother began to lose her sight from glaucoma around this time and, disturbed by her plight, I went to work as Executive Director of the Massachusetts Society of Eye Physicians and Surgeons, determined to educate the public about the disease; and in this capacity, I designed and launched multiple media campaigns (posters on public transportation, billboards throughout the city, radio and television announcements, cable shows, etc. ) , focusing primarily on the African-American community which is at increasing risk. I received many awards for this program and served in a similar capacity as Public Health Director for the New England Ophthalmological Society, the oldest speciality organization in the United States. I spend at least a month every year in Greece and have visited over twenty-five islands and know the country well. I paint in both oils and acrylics, etch, cook (I've mastered many native cuisines, but my main focus is Greek) make prints and etch, spend many joyful hours with my granddaughters Zoe and Grace Hartnagel and my grandson, George Baltopoulos,and volunteer on a weekly basis as a tutor in an MIT-sponsored ESL program.
