Leta Serafim’s When the Devil’s Idle, sequel to The Devil Takes Half, receives an incredible review from Publisher’s Weekly!
“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
When an elderly German is found with his skull bashed in on Patmos, the same isle St. John wrote the Apocalypse, Yiannis Patronas, Chief Officer of the Chios police, is called in to investigate. He asks his top detective, Giorgos Tembelos, and his friend and amateur sleuth, Papa Michalis to join him.
With only a handful of suspects on such an isolated island— the gardener, the housekeeper, the deceased’s son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren— Patronas is limited, and yet even more challenged. Who is capable? Who has motive? Who wanted the old German dead? Why? Could the answers be immediate or far reaching?
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