Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
EAN num: 9780099468349
ISBN number: 0099468344
Label: Arrow
Manufacturer: Arrow
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: February 06, 2006
Publishing house: Arrow
Release Date: February 06, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 1316566
Studio: Arrow
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Product Description:
In the winter of 330-329 BC Athens itself suffers a series of alarming thefts and home robberies. It seems that nobody is safe. The great philosopher Aristotle helps his former student Stephanos investigate a break-in and brutal murder at the house of one of his Athenian neighbours. The man fingered for the crime turns against Stephanos just as he is planning his marriage. It is difficult to arrange a big fat Greek wedding when someone seems to be trying to kill you. Elsewhere bodies begin to pile up - who will be bludgeoned or stabbed or strangled next? Stephanos' bride is Philomela. Her parental home is Eleusis, famous for the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, home of the sacred site of the Mysteries of Eleusis. Religious initiation is open to all adult Greek speakers, slave and free, with the exception of anyone guilty of homicide. Stephanos, Philomela, and Aristotle undertake mystic initiation in a complex ritual whose ultimate secrets cannot be spoken, on pain of death. Eleusis conceals many secrets, and revelation of the truth must await the night of the Mystery celebration itself. This is the fifth novel featuring Aristotle as the very first detective of the ancient world, following 'Aristotle Detective', 'Aristotle and Poetic Justice', 'The Secrets of Life', and 'Poison In Athens'.
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Rated by buyers -
Doody finally brings us to the end of the torturous sub-plot that has pervaded the last few novels. Namely, Stephanos' wedding to Philomena. It provides an excuse for our laconic sleuth to muse in a post-drunken wedding binge that someone might have chucked a sharp knife at him. In turn, this enables him, post-nuptials, to start to think about things other than the sorry state of his interior and exterior décor, symposiums and solving the odd magpie inspired theft here and there that have not gripped our attention up to this point.
Doody's slow inexorable plot style drags the unwilling reader along again so that by page two hundred or so of the paperback version we find ourselves wondering exactly what task Stephanos and Aristotle are being set by the author other than responding to a trumped-up charge of boundary poaching by the neighbour of his newly extended family. However, lurking furtively in the background is the murder of the helpful Sophilios and, also, Arhkias' disclaimer over the amount of drakhmai he lost in the incident.
Doody has Philomela express a desire to join the mysteries of Eleusis and this coincides with Aristotle's slave, for whom his affection grows daily. As the novel progresses we find ourselves bombarded with more and more problems and the clue to it all lies in exactly the fact there is an inundation. Stephanos' stumbles alarmingly through his Eleusian initiation, gets overly raucous in the Agora as he's accused of not fulfilling his previous nuptial agreements, finds himself on the receiving end of a knife thrower and a marble head a few times, up on his own tiles and generally harassed left right and centre as he tries to deal with a spurious land ownership charge by Lykon and locate missing children.
By the time we reach our denouement in a pottery shop where we get a quick rash of murders based on the fallings out of a criminal gang, Doody neatly ties up the thievery with Stephano's beleaguered life and we come away satisified that out of the murky randomness was actually a very clever plot. I have to say that I have found the Stephanos mysteries extremely laborious to plow through but this is by far the best so long as you keep gong past page two hundred. It'll be interesting to see if Stephanos continues to improve.
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