When the body of a boy from one of Greece’s most prominent families turns up in a dumpster in one of Athens’ worst neighborhoods, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis of the Greek Police’s Special Crimes Division is certain there’s a message in the murder. But who sent it, and why?

Kaldis’ politically incorrect search for answers takes him deep into the sordid, criminal side of Athens and its nightlife and on to the glittering society world of Athens where age-old frictions between new money and old breed jealousy, murder, revenge, revolutionaries, and some very dangerous truths.

Jeffrey Siger combines his unique perspective and insider-like knowledge of Greece to create a highly entertaining yet thought provoking novel–for Assassins of Athens is a Greek tragedy of another sort.

On the celebrated Greek island of Mykonos, a legendary nightclub owner is found in his home, bludgeoned to death. In his lifetime he had helped transform Mykonos from an obscure, impoverished Aegean island into a world-renowned summertime playground for the world’s rich and powerful, which made the Mykonian people some of the wealthiest in Greece. All evidence points to obvious killers, but the murder has put into play some long-hidden, politically explosive secrets and drawn a dangerous foreign investor to the island paradise.

Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis, feared head of Greece’s special crimes division, is certain there is a far more complex solution to the murder, and he vows to find it. His quest for answers, amid the entrenched cultural contradictions that give Mykonos so much of its magic, has him battling ruthless opportunists preying on his country’s weakened financial condition. And he soon learns that there is an unexpected high price to pay for his curiosity as he becomes locked in a war with a powerful, clandestine international force willing to do whatever it takes to recast and control Mykonos–no matter what the cost, no matter who must die.

Saint John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation over 1,900 years ago in a cave on Greece’s eastern Aegean island of Patmos. But now there has been a murder. A revered monk from that holy island’s thousand-year-old monastery is murdered in Patmos’ town square during Easter week. Called in on the matter is Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis of Greece’s Special Crimes Division. Kaldis must find the killer before all hell breaks loose—in a manner of speaking.

Kaldis’ impolitic search for answers brings him face-to-face with a scandal haunting the world’s oldest surviving monastic community. On the pristine Aegean peninsula of Mount Athos, isolated from the rest of humanity, twenty monasteries sit protecting the secrets of Byzantium amid a way of life virtually unchanged for more than 1,500 years. But today this sacred refuge harbors modern international intrigues that threaten to destroy the very heart of the Church—in a matter of days.

Did the warriors of ancient Sparta simply vanish without a trace along with their city, or did they find sanctuary in the Mani region 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 him 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 so too the deal.

Acting swiftly to head off a new cycle of violence, Kouros satisfactorily solves the murder–or so it seems. Back in Athens, Kaldis’ probe into deeply entrenched government corruption leads straight back to the Mani. Both detectives now confront a host of unexpected twists, unanticipated players, unanswered questions–and people yet to die.

In an isolated olive grove on the idyllic Aegean island of Tinos, revered by religious pilgrims around the world as the Lourdes of Greece, two bodies charred beyond recognition are discovered, chained together amid bits and pieces of an incinerated Greek flag. An enraged press screams for justice for the unknown victims, until the dead are identified as gypsies, after which the story simply fades away.

Is it a gypsy clan war, a hate crime, or something else? With no one seeming to care, the government has no interest in resurrecting unwanted media attention by a search for answers to such ethnically charged questions and orders the investigation closed.

However, Inspector Andreas Kaldis, feared head of Greece’s special crimes division, has other plans. He presses on in his inimitable, impolitic style to unravel a mystery that reveals even more dead, uncovers a modern secret society rooted in two-hundred-year-old traditions, and spawns a nagging suspicion that the answers lie in the sudden influx of non-Greeks and gypsies to Tinos.

It is there, on Tinos, that Kaldis learns of priceless hoards of gold, silver, art, and precious gems quietly amassed over centuries out of the offerings of grateful pilgrims. He has found a motive for murder and an irresistible temptation for robbery.

All that is left for Andreas to do is find the killers before more die, stop the robbery of the century, and get married in the process.