Reprinted from Green Man Review.
As my reviews affirm, I am a fan of Barbara Cleverly’s Joe Sandilands murder mystery series. Imagine my surprise when my spouse called my attention to a new Barbara Cleverly series, featuring an entirely different lead character, archaeologist Laetitia (Letty) Talbot! The Tomb of Zeus is the debut novel in this series, and I thought it worthy of a review.
In addition to occupying roughly the same genre as the Joe Sandilands series, the Laetitia Talbot series is set in roughly the same time period. The Tomb of Zeus takes place in 1928. Like the Sandilands novels, Cleverly starts this one with a brief prologue set some years in the past that provides a veiled clue to the mystery in the novel. This prologue takes place in 1898. The year is significant because all the action of this novel takes place on the Mediterranean island of Crete, which in 1898 declared its independence from the Ottoman Turks in an uprising that resulted in many deaths and much destruction of property. By the time the primary action of this novel occurs, Crete has become a region of the nation of Greece.
This novel reflects the interest in the island as an archaeological site that followed upon Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery of evidence of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization at Knossos in the 1890s. The main narrative opens with Letty arriving by steamer at Herakleion, the island’s major port. Shortly before disembarking, she meets young George Russell, who happens to be the son of her host on the island, the archaeologist Theodore Russell. With a few brief lines, Cleverly establishes that Letty is in her early 20s, tall and attractive, from a wealthy family, educated and headstrong. These attributes all play into the novel’s unfolding plot and Letty’s approach to situations that arise.
Within a matter of hours of arriving at Russell’s house, the Villa Europa, Letty finds herself embroiled in a series of intense and disturbing interactions among George and his father and Phoebe, Theodore’s second wife and George’s stepmother. Within a matter of days, Letty comes upon Phoebe’s lifeless body hanging from a beam in her bedroom, the apparent victim of a suicide. The rest of the novel follows Letty’s efforts as an amateur detective to figure out what really happened to Phoebe. She is joined in this effort by William Gunning, a member of the elder Russell’s digging crew and a former associate of Letty’s, and by Mariani, the urbane local police inspector. Their investigations lead them to a tangled knot of family secrets that King Minos himself would have appreciated!
The Tomb of Zeus clocks in at just around 350 pages, a bit longer your average murder mystery. The narrative flows nicely, though, and Cleverly has done a good job of balancing dialogue and exposition. I greatly enjoyed her descriptions of the island — I read Mary Renault’s novels about Crete, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, when I was a teenager and so have old attachments to the Minoan culture that this novel recalled. Her detailed descriptions of the archaeological dig on the hillside overlooking the village of Kastelli add a nice touch of realism to the story. As a former student of classical Greek and Latin, I also appreciated her periodic nods to ancient literary works, such as the plays of Euripides, the legend of the Minotaur, the philosophy of Epimenides, the imagery of Homer (e.g., “the wine-dark sea”).
Cleverly wrote The Tomb of Zeus in the third person, and while Letty remains the primary focus, the perspective occasionally shifts away from her, so that the reader becomes aware of some of the facts of the case before Letty does. Nonetheless, I did not find it possible to assemble any of the clues into a meaningful pattern before Cleverly intended me to.
Overall, I found The Tomb of Zeus an enjoyable read, and Letty a believable and sympathetic heroine. I’m looking forward to seeing more of this character — but I hope that Barbara Cleverly hasn’t tired of Joe Sandilands — I like him, too!
(Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2007)
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