★ 08/11/2014
For Chief Insp. Andreas Kaldis, interacting with known crime boss Orestes is just another day at the office in Siger’s perfectly plotted sixth mystery set in Greece (after 2013’s Mykonos After Midnight). But for Special Crimes Division detective Yianni Kouros things get a little too personal when a beloved relative, Uncle, drives his car off a cliff on the road to Cape Tenaro. This fatal “accident” appears directly or indirectly connected to Orestes. Even though Uncle had “retired” from running his own crime syndicate for a decade, he was knee-deep in a land deal that’s beginning to smell fishier than a net full of sunbaked sea bass. Of course, Uncle’s demise puts the kibosh on that deal, and the intrepid detectives must figure out who benefits from the old man’s death before Kouros’s cousins revive ancient family feuds. Siger’s paints travelogue-worthy pictures of a breathtakingly beautiful—if politically corrupt—Greece. (Oct.)
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Overview
"Siger paints travelogue-worthy pictures of a breathtakingly beautiful—if politically corrupt—Greece." —Publishers Weekly STARRED review
Did the warriors of ancient Sparta simply vanish without a trace along with their city, or did they find sanctuary at the tip of the mountainous Peloponnese? That stark, unforgiving region's roots today run deep with a history of pirates, highwaymen, and neighbors ferociously repelling any foreigner foolishly bent on occupying this part of Greece. Less well-recorded are the Mani's families' strict code of honor and their history of endless vendettas with neighbors and with their own relatives. No wonder their farms look like fortresses.
When Special Crimes Division Detective Yiannis Kouros is summoned from Athens to the Mani by his uncle, Kouros fears his loyalty to his boss, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis, is about be to be tested by family pressure on the detective to act in some new vendetta, for this uncle once headed the Mani's most significant criminal enterprise. Instead, Kouros learns the family is about to become rich through the sale of its property—until the uncle is killed, and thus the deal. Acting swiftly to head off a new cycle of violence, Kouros satisfactorily solves the murder. Or so it seems until, back in Athens, Kaldis' probe into deeply entrenched government corruption leads straight back to the Mani. Both cops now confront a host of unexpected twists, unanticipated players, unanswered questions—and people yet to die.
Editorial Reviews
"Filled with local color, action, and humor, this story will give readers a taste of modern Greek culture and its ancient roots."
2014-10-09
A rugged region of Greece harbors rough and vengeful crime syndicates. Is veteran Inspector Kaldis tough enough to break them? Detective Yianni Kouros is summoned by his uncle to the remote region of Mani in Southern Greece, where lawlessness is common and family bonds are tight. Uncle, who formerly ran a small criminal empire, is about to sell his land to a developer in light of a recent tourist boom that threatens to change the nature of the area drastically. Shortly after absorbing this remarkable news, Kouros gets a call in Athens from his cousin Mangas reporting that Uncle has died after his car ran off the road. Kouros is immediately worried that it's the start of a bloody clan war. "Time to speak to the chief"—that is, his boss, Andreas Kaldis. Not one to mince words or avoid confrontation, Kaldis, who heads the country's Special Crime Division, immediately confronts Orestes, Mani's criminal alpha dog, who makes a point of snubbing him. At Uncle's funeral, Kouros is shocked to see his grieving cousin Calliope challenge her brothers to seek vengeance via a bristling poem she delivers at her father's grave. Tassos Stamatos, chief homicide investigator for the Cyclades islands, recommends that Andreas steer clear of Orestes, but that's hardly his style; when he learns that Uncle was poisoned, his course is set. Kouros, meanwhile, seeks to befriend Uncle's mates in the local tavern and elsewhere. Both lawmen are surprised by the identity of the killer. Kaldis' sixth case (Mykonos After Midnight, 2013, etc.) offers a lively, gritty plot, an abundance of local color and two righteous heroes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781464203176 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sourcebooks |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2014 |
| Series: | Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Series , #6 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 1,111,558 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Related Subjects
Read an Excerpt
Sons of Sparta
A Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Mystery
By Jeffrey Siger
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey SigerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0317-6
CHAPTER 1
As he drove alone down the highway the tune kept running through his head. An old Greek ballad. He couldn't shake it. Not since early morning, when his father's brother called to say, "Come home at once," offering no more of an explanation than "It's a family matter."
Everyone in his family knew the words that went with the tune, lyrics that spoke of family honor and all that was expected of those duty-bound to protect it. The song told the story of his father's father and what his family had demanded of him a hundred years before:
In the early 1900s a young medical student studying in Athens received a message from his father to return home at once. The trip from Athens to the Mani, in the southernmost part of Greece's Peloponnese, took several days. When the student arrived home he learned that his younger sister had humiliated their father by becoming pregnant by a young man in their village. Her lover had proposed to marry his sister, but their father refused. Instead, in front of his sister and her lover he told his son to shoot and kill them both.
The lovers ran from the house, but the brother caught up with his sister in the courtyard and murdered her there. His sister's lover he caught and killed at the port as he tried to escape by boat.
At the trial of the brother for killing his sister and her lover, the Judge was about to render his decision when the Judge's mother stood and shouted at her son, "Just remember before you pass judgment that you murdered your own sister for the very same reason."
The brother was acquitted and returned to medical school.
The driver shot a quick glance down at the Corinth canal as he passed west from the Greek mainland onto the Peloponnese peninsula.
I wonder what Uncle has in mind, thought Greece's Special Crimes Division detective Yianni Kouros. Judges weren't as forgiving these days as they had been in his grandfather's day.
* * *
The Peloponnese stood as the southernmost part of mainland Greece, about the same size as the American state of Massachusetts. It had served as the setting for much of the blood-soaked drama that played out across ancient Greece, as well as the ancestral home to Spartan power that had rattled the ancient world even more than its legend resonated in popular imagination today. Many said the ancient Spartans simply vanished from the Earth without a trace, same as their city. Others believed they had gone farther south and found sanctuary deep in the mountain-spined, middle peninsula of the trident-shaped tip of the Peloponnese, to the region known as the Mani.
Kouros smiled as he recalled his father blasting anyone who dared question the Mani's claim to Spartan origins. Maniots took great pride in their region's colorful, notorious history as home to their pirate, highwayman, and warrior ancestors; in men and women fighting ferociously alongside other Maniots to defeat every foreign force foolish enough to attempt to occupy their part of Greece; and in being the first to declare war on the Turks in Greece's 1821 War of Independence.
But the smile faded as he thought of his uncle, the last male of his generation. The others had all died young, Kouros' father the only one from natural causes.
West of Corinth, Kouros turned south at Tripoli onto a two-lane road toward Sparta. In these late October days, with most tourists gone, he'd made good time, but still had halfway to go, and beyond Sparta the road would slow him down even more. This wasn't the Sparta of ancient times, whose inhabitants lived a warrior life disinterested in erecting the magnificent edifices so important to their northern Peloponnese neighbors and the far-off Athenians. No, this was modern Sparta, a town of government offices, businesses, and residences where prosperity depended upon groves of oranges and olives, not on war.
North of Sparta the road coursed through a five-mile stretch of lush, high, mountain passes overlooking broad green valleys and a horizon of jagged mountain giants. He always wondered as he traveled through this wilderness why nearly one-half of Greece's eleven million people chose to live crammed together around Athens with so much of Greece this green and uninhabited.
And I'm one of them.
South of Sparta, Kouros passed into the Mani. The land turned harsher, wilder, tougher, less forgiving, though still green and filled with citrus, olives, and corn. But once he turned west and began climbing the rugged north-south Taygetos mountain range, greens swiftly turned to browns and grays. On the other side of those mountains lay the region of the Mani his family called home—arid rocky land penned in by the Ionian Sea to the west and worn-down limestone mountains to the east, a place where olive trees battled with boulders for the region's arable land.
The source of this part of the Mani's only significant modern economy loomed like sentinels along the ridges and hillsides: ancient four- and five-story, square, stone battle towers, historical treasures erected by Mani families as far back as the thirteenth century, which today drew tourists in flocks.
But to Kouros the towers were stark reminders of another side to the Maniots' fierce character, for although they offered strong defensive positions against bandits, pirates, and foreign invaders, their principal purpose served the families' ruthless battles with their neighbors. Here the concept of family vendetta was so deeply engrained that Mani society had rules on how, when, and against whom vengeance could and could not be taken. Doctors and priests, for instance, were considered too valuable to the community to serve as targets of an offended family.
At the southern end of a long, wide plateau running between the road and the mountains, Kouros turned left and followed a rock and dirt lane up toward a sharp-edged, two-story stone farmhouse. Decade-old cars and a couple of beat-up pickups sat parked every which way next to a five-story, beige and gray tower made of the same stone as the farmhouse a hundred feet away.
He parked next to one of the pickups and sat for a moment, staring at the farmhouse. Everything about it, from the color of its walls, its roughhewn wooden front door, and its traditional Peloponnesian terra-cotta-tiled roof, brought one word to mind: nondescript.
Precisely how his uncle wanted his home to appear to the outside world.
* * *
On the other side of the farmhouse door lay what few could imagine existed in historically impoverished, southwest Mani. This was Mesa or Deep Mani, where people struggled with virtually waterless, salt-wind-driven land, enduring lives far more difficult than did Maniots living in the fertile, olive- and honey-rich areas of Exo or Outer Mani to the north, or to the east, beyond the Taygetos mountain range, in Kato or Lower Mani.
Amid land so poor and scarce that not even the deeply held Greek tradition of dowry was practiced, Uncle's home featured artwork and furnishings as fine as any to be found in a ship owner's Athenian mansion. Its ground floor, which once functioned as stables, mangers, and a barrier from the damp ground, now served as the main living area.
Kouros' grandfather had lived in this house after finishing medical school. He'd returned to his village to practice medicine, serving what he called his penance for taking his sister's and her lover's lives. He spent his life committed to helping any woman in trouble, defending her however necessary, knowing he'd be spared vendetta assassination by reason of his position as a doctor. In this same house, he'd lived to die in his sleep after fathering four sons and two daughters.
Regrettably, his children did not share their father's immunity from revenge, and the savagery that had plagued the Deep Mani for so much of its history claimed three of his children—retribution for acts by their father considered insults to the honor of another family.
Kouros' father and one aunt survived because they were sent away to live in Athens. His uncle had been spared, according to him, because the village's council of elders— charged with ruling on feuds among warring clan families—placed Uncle outside the bounds of vendetta, fearing that his father would abandon the village and leave it without a doctor should Uncle, his last surviving child there, be killed.
Kouros' father, however, had a different explanation for his brother's longevity. He attributed Uncle's survival to his uncanny skill at modernizing traditional Mani techniques for augmenting their barely subsistence standard of living: piracy and banditry.
Throughout its history the Mani welcomed pirates on its seas and bandits to its hills. With the introduction in the 1960s of paved roads across mountains that once isolated much of the Mani from the rest of Greece, Uncle had seen his opportunity to spread proven Mani methods to the rest of Greece.
Soon, Uncle had not only feuding families but also rival clans working together as their Maniot ancestors had once united solely to battle foreign invaders. But now their rallying cry was a call to rack up profits in a united criminal enterprise. Up until a decade before, when Kouros' uncle "retired," as he called it, Uncle had been the most significant criminal leader in the region. A position in obvious counterpoint to his nephew's current role as right hand to Andreas Kaldis, feared chief of the Greek police's national anticrime and political corruption division.
Kouros' and his uncle's different approaches to life had never been an issue between the two men. Kouros' father had passed away and his uncle retired before Kouros became a cop, and on the occasions they'd been together since, Kouros had sensed an unstated bit of pride in Uncle that his older brother's son had made it to the "other" side.
Then again, nothing before had ever put their differences in conflict. As Kouros knocked on the front door, he hoped that wasn't about to change.
CHAPTER 2A dark-haired, barely teenage girl in jeans and a pink hoodie opened the door. "It's Yianni," she said to seven men in jeans and work shirts sitting at a white linen-covered table in a room just beyond the entryway.
"She means Athens Yianni," said one of the men.
"Of course she does," said a white-haired man at the far end of the table, his face lit up in a broad smile, eyes sparkling. "The rest of you malaka Yiannis are already here." Uncle had just affectionately lumped nearly half of Kouros' cousins into the category of wankers.
Uncle stood up and spread his arms wide, like a bear waiting to embrace a bull.
"You look terrific, Uncle. I see you let your hair grow longer."
The two men hugged and exchanged kisses on both cheeks. "Stop bullshitting a bullshitter. I'm a fat old man and you know it. Everyone knows it."
Kouros' reply was lost in barrage of comments and catcalls from the men at the table as they shuffled back chairs and stood to embrace and exchange kisses with their cousin.
Uncle stood by his chair, watching and smiling.
"Where shall I sit?" asked Kouros.
"Next to your uncle," said a man about Kouros' age, but a head taller and far broader. "We have to put up with him all the time. You haven't had the pleasure since our cousin's wedding."
"And that was three years ago. It's way past your turn to suffer through his stories," said a younger and shorter man.
The group laughed as Uncle shook his head and looked at Kouros. "They're very lucky your aunt is no longer with us to hear them speak like that about her husband."
"Theos singhorese tin," nodded the big man. "If mother were still alive, no one would dare speak like that. She'd whip us all."
More laughter, and more wishes that "God forgive her soul."
Uncle raised a bottle of beer. "A toast. To all of us. Together again. Yia sas."
Kouros picked up a beer and clinked the bottle against his uncle's, "Yia sas." He went around the table doing the same with each cousin, every one a bull. Some small, some large. Kouros fell into the middle of the herd.
Though it was still early afternoon, Kouros figured from the number of soiled plates, empty beer bottles, and overflowing ashtrays on the table that they'd been carrying on like this for hours. But no one seemed drunk, as if everyone realized there was a serious purpose for this get-together.
A woman in her thirties walked in from the kitchen, carrying plates filled with food, followed by the girl in the pink sweatshirt carrying more food.
"Here, Yianni, you must be starved. Eat," said the woman.
"Cousin Calliope! I can't believe it's you."
"Why, do I look so bad?"
Kouros nodded toward the girl. "No, you look like your niece's sister, not her aunt."
The teenage girl rolled her eyes.
Calliope smiled. "Father," she said to Uncle, "if this is how men from Athens talk, I understand why you and Mother never let me leave home." She bent over and gave Kouros a big kiss on each cheek, then a smack to the back of his head.
Kouros smiled, "Glad to see you picked up where your mother left off."
Calliope waved a hand at the men at the table. "Someone has to keep this family in line."
The men laughed. But not too hard, for they knew there was truth in her words. Historically, Mani fathers were rarely home, leaving Mani mothers to decide family matters, such as selecting which of her sons would face death to avenge a slight to the honor of the family.
"Come," she said to her niece. "Back to the kitchen. Time to leave the men alone to tell more lies to each another."
Uncle leaned over to Kouros. "I've been blessed with two daughters and three sons. Luckily, only Calliope lives with me. For she's the less strong-willed of the sisters. I think your aunt trained them to haunt me." He smiled. "Eat. We'll talk later."
Kouros ate as Uncle's oldest son, the biggest of the cousins, talked about a tourism explosion in their part of the Mani. "The land's yielding more euros per acre from visitors than any crop ever did."
"Later, Mangas," said Uncle. "Let your cousin finish his meal in peace."
He'd used his eldest son's nickname, not his given name, Yianni. Greek tradition had the firstborn son named after his paternal grandfather and the second son after his maternal grandfather. That's why four of the seven cousins sitting around Uncle's table were Yiannis: Mangas, Kouros, Uncle's slain brother's son, and his surviving sister's second son. The non-Yianni cousins were Uncle's two younger sons, Theo and Giorgos, and the surviving sister's older son, Pericles. To the extent the interests of the female members of the family were affected by this meeting, it would be up to their brothers and sons to protect them.
"Don't worry about me, Uncle. I can chew and listen at the same time," said Kouros.
"No. You'll finish, then we'll talk." Uncle's voice was hard.
Kouros finished as quickly as he could without offending his uncle.
"Would you like more?"
"No, thank you."
Uncle nodded, paused for a few seconds, and smacked his hands firmly on the table.
Seven bulls jerked to attention.
"It is time."
* * *
"Our ancestors have lived on this land for hundreds of years. We are Mani. No one can ever change that. No government, no foreigner, no neighbor. And while some of our neighbors may choose to sell their birthrights, we shall never sell."
Some cousins nodded.
"But I also appreciate the times in which we live, and the struggles many of you face. And will continue to face. We are a family and no one of us should benefit at the expense of another."
Where is he headed with this? thought Kouros. He caught a puzzled look on the face of his slain uncle's son. I guess I'm not the only one wondering.
"I've decided to accept a proposal for our property."
"What?" said Uncle's youngest son, Giorgos. "You can't. You just said you'd never sell."
"Giorgos is right," said his brother, Theo. "This is our home. We can't leave it except through death."
Uncle raised his hands to calm his sons. "Spoken as true sons of Mani, for which I'm proud. But hear me out."
Giorgos' face was blood red, but he said not a word. In the Mani you dared not disrespect your elders.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sons of Sparta by Jeffrey Siger. Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey Siger. Excerpted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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