Windows To The World

Prey on Patmos by Jeffery Siger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On a dark night early in the Easter Week of the Greek Orthodox Church, part of the body of the larger Eastern Orthodox Church, a saintly monk is cruelly murdered on the winding streets of Patmos, an island in Greece.
The crime was heinous not only because of the nature of the victim but because it happened during a holy time and in a holy place.

Patmos

Patmos is in the eastern Aegean and it is here in a cave almost 2000 years ago that Saint John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. It has a small police force of it’s own but in an unusual case like this one which many would like to attribute to muggers, Chief Inspector Andreas Caldis of the Special Crimes Division is called to take over the investigation.

Mount Athos

In the Greek Orthodox Church Easter is the most important day of the year.  Easter week is the week preceding Easter day. Tourists flock to places such as Patmos and Mount Athos another religious site that contains 20 monasteries, which have been there fifteen centuries.
Mount Athos is a self-governing monastic state that is vaguely a parallel to Rome. The monasteries all have one representative to a central Holy Community. And the leader of this group is known as the Protos. Ultimately the heard of the Eastern Orthodox Church resides in Istanbul once known as Constantinople, Turkey.  At this time the Turks have passed new laws who ultimate effect will be to push the central leader and his organization out of Turkey from whence it will be moved to Either Russia or Greece.  Naturally the Greeks prefer this latter scenario and the politics surrounding this move are at once complicated and devious.

 Solving this murder is going to be difficult because initial findings mean that Kaldis must be privy to the inside workings of the monasteries and most abbots believe in keeping their own council. Andreas and his associate have an uphill battle as they use every source in their power to find a killer hidden deep in monastic life surrounded by many people who think he is just an ordinary or maybe an extraordinary monk.



I enjoyed this book tremendously. Reading about the history of an area greatly enhances my reading experience. I took a lot away from this book.