When The Devil’s Idle by Leta Serafim

when_idle
When The Devil’s Idle
ISBN: 978-1-60381-998-5
Paperback: $13.95
Ebook: $5.95

When the Devil’s Idle (192 pages) is the second book in Leta Serafim’s Greek Islands Mystery series. While investigating the death of a German tourist on Patmos, Chief Officer Patronas uncovers terrible secrets.

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Book 1, The Devil Takes Half, was a finalist in the mystery category of the Eric Hoffer Awards and received a starred review from Library Journal.

(Starred Review) “This classic fair-play whodunit, the excellent sequel to 2014’s The Devil Takes Half (Serafim’s first Greek Island mystery), takes Yiannis Patronas, the endearing chief police officer on the island of Chios, to Patmos, where someone has bashed in the skull of Walter Bechtel, a 90-year-old German, in the garden of his foster son Gunther’s holiday residence—and carved a swastika on the victim’s forehead. When Patronas asks Gunther about his foster father’s past, Gunther becomes defensive and claims that his papa was ‘just an ordinary man’ and did not commit any atrocities during WWII. Serafim does an especially good job of integrating Greece’s current financial struggles into the story line, and Patronas’s colleagues, especially an eccentric priest with a taste for seafood, lighten what otherwise could have been a very grim tale without minimizing the underlying horror of the background to the crime.”

—Publishers Weekly, August 3, 2015

4 Stars: “The pairing of cynical Patronas and optimistic Michalis injects some humor in an otherwise moderately paced procedural. Serafim expertly creates the beauty of Greece. However, the real draws of this book are the fully developed, complex characters, and the facts on Greek culture and history. Book two in the Greek Islands Mystery series is sure to satisfy.”

—RT Magazine

“A deftly crafted and thoroughly absorbing read from beginning to end, When the Devil’s Idle is a compelling and very highly recommended addition to community library Mystery/Suspense collections…. Also very highly recommended is the first volume in this outstanding series, The Devil Takes Half. Appreciative readers will all be looking eagerly toward author Leta Serafim’s next title in her Greek Island Mystery series.”  Read more….

—Julie Summers, Reviewer, The Midwest Book Review

In the Book of Revelation, written by St. John on the Greek island of Patmos, it was said a pale horse would appear whose rider was death, others would cry out for vengeance, and the stars of heaven would fall to the earth.

Death does indeed come to Patmos when a German tourist is found murdered in the garden of one of the island’s fabled estates. Yiannis Patronas, Chief Officer of the Chios police, is called in to investigate. He summons his top detective, Giorgos Tembelos, and his friend and amateur sleuth, Papa Michalis, to assist him.

What the policemen discover will disturb them long after the conclusion of the case. Only six people were at the house at the time of the murder—the gardener and housekeeper, the victim’s son and his wife and their two children, a boy of seven and a teenage girl of sixteen. All appear to be innocent. But access to the isolated estate is severely restricted. Surrounded by high walls, it has only one entrance: a metal gate that was bolted at the time of the crime. Patronas can only conclude that one of the six is a killer. He continues to probe, uncovering the family’s many secrets. Some are very old, others more recent. All are horrifying.

But which of these secrets led to murder?

Says the author, “I have visited Patmos many times and have always found it to be a place of contrasts, the enclave of extraordinarily wealthy Europeans at the top of a mountain in Chora and the Greek natives struggling to survive in the village below. I used to watch these two groups interact and wonder what would happen if violence intruded. Voted the most idyllic place to live in Europe by Forbes in 2009, the island itself is very small, less than thirteen square miles, and has only 3,000 year-round residents. It is called ‘the holy island,’ by many, in marked contrast with the characters and events I describe in When the Devil is Idle.”

Leta Serafim is also the author of the historical novel, To Look on Death No More, which will be published by Coffeetown Press in February, 2016. She has visited over twenty-five islands in Greece and continues to divide her time between Boston and Greece. Click here to find her online.

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