Prey on Patmos

By Jeffery Siger and Jeffrey Siger

Saint John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation over 1900 years ago in a cave on Greece’s eastern Aegean island of Patmos. When a revered monk from that holy island’s thousand year-old monastery is murdered in Patmos’ town square during Easter Week, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis of Greece’s Twenty-First Century Special Crimes Division is called upon to find the killer before all hell breaks loose…in a manner of speaking. Andreas’ 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 1500 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Release date: May 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781615952458

Jeffery Siger

Jeffrey Siger was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He practiced law at a major Wall Street law firm and, while there, served as Special Counsel to the citizens group responsible for reporting on New York City’s prison conditions. He left Wall Street to join his own New York City law firm and continued as one of its name partners, until giving it all up to write full-time among the people, life, and politics of his beloved Mykonos, his adopted home of twenty-five years. His other home is a farm outside New York City.

Reviews for Prey on Patmos

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis investigates the murder of a monk on the island of Patmos during Holy Week. At the same time, Lila (to whom he is not married) is about to give birth to their first child. Kaldis hopes he can wrap the investigation up quickly so he can return home quickly, but it becomes apparent that this murder was committed by professionals. Readers become versed in church politics and the tensions between the Greek and Russian Orthodox factions. Stefan Rudnicki did a good job narrating the Blackstone Audio version of the book. Siger skillfully plotted the book, creating tensions at the right moments and keeping the reader interested from start to finish. The only negative for me was the use of more profanity than I am comfortable reading or hearing. This is the third in the series, and I've only read the first. Siger overcame the flaws of the first novel with better development of plot and characters in this one.

[condorena · Rating: 4 out 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 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.

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.

[macabr_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

PREY ON PATMOS is the third book in the Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis series and, like its predecessors, is an entertaining police procedural and an engrossing look at twenty-first century social problems against the background of an ancient culture.“There was an unusual cadence to the man’s walk. Maybe it was the uneven stone lane. But he’d walked this path ten thousand times, thought not so soon before first light. Still, he knew it well enough. He paused, as if to listen, then moved five paces and paused again….Perhaps he should have been looking as carefully as he listened, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The men stood quietly at the bottom of the path, just beyond where it opened in the the town square. He could not see them.” In an instant, his throat cut, Kalogeros Vassilis lies dead in the town square of Patmos, the island home of monasteries built on the holy ground where St. John wrote the Book of Revelations. Vassilis was an old man who had lived a life of devotion to his faith. Why would anyone kill him?The answer to that question becomes the responsibility of Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis and his partner, Yianni Kouros. Andreas is the head of the Greek Police’s Special Crimes Division and the murder of a monk on Patmos just before Easter, the most important day in the Christian calendar, is a very special crime. Andreas isn’t just confronted with satisfying the demands of the government functionaries who want credit for a quick solution of the murder; Andreas is up against the formidable power and position of the Eastern Orthodox Church.As they investigate, Andreas and Yianni learn that Vassilis was a committed researcher, using the internet to unravel the rules that governed the choice of the Ecumenical Patriarch, the leader of all the branches of the Orthodox church. To the secular world such issues hardly seem the stuff of life and death. But the religious world is also a world of human beings and a religious life doesn’t mean a life without temptation and sin.The death of Vassilis reveals that monasteries that have thrived for over a thousand years are not immune from the intrusion of twenty-first century political reality. For a thousand years, men have withdrawn from the world to do penance for the evils they have committed and men have escaped from the world to avoid punishment for the crimes they do not regret. Andreas and Yianni, with the help of Mykonos cop Tassos Stamatos, are faced with investigation by secret meetings, hidden identities, and role playing. Gaining control of the great wealth of the Orthodox church is a powerful motivator for the ruthless and the amoral.The author creates this piece of dialogue: “So much of life is illusion, driven by masters of manipulation who incite passions, instill mortal fears, justify actions. They’ve always existed, always will. But those to fear, to guard against – and yes, to pray against – are illusionists who act without conscience, without values, without any moral compass.” It succinctly expresses the theme of this excellent book.On one level, PREY ON PATMOS is an excellent police procedural. On another level, the book continues Jeffrey Siger’s look at some of the most profound problems faced by society now. MURDER IN MYKONOS examined the phenomenon of the serial killer, a person who kills simply for the joy of killing. Victims are random, there is no motive other the compulsion of the killer and, in that, lies the fear that no one is safe. ASSASSINS OF ATHENS uses the murder of the scion of a wealthy family, intense family rivalries, and a return to some of the practices of ancient Athens to undermine the democracy that the Athenians invented. PREY ON PATMOS goes to the core of the Greek character. In the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, Siger writes, “Today, Greece is a land of unwavering faith in God and a unique commitment to the Eastern Orthodox Church as an integral part of its way of life.” In this third book, that for which people have been willing to die is under attack by those willing to use God and faith as an instrument for societal erosion.PREY ON PATMOS led me to do something I would never have dreamed of doing before reading this book. The story captures the reader from the first paragraph so I couldn’t stop reading but there was so much information I wanted to investigate that I made marks in the margin, an unforgivable sin for a bibliophile.Jeffrey Siger succeeds in a complicated balancing act. In a work of fiction, the author creates a murder that is tied to characters who use religion as a cover for their sinful actions while never being, in anyway, disrespectful to the Eastern Orthodox Church or the Christian faith.

[auntmarge64 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An enjoyable third Inspector Kaldis mystery, set primarily on the Greek island of Patmos, where Saint John wrote the Book of Revelation. A beloved elderly monk is murdered, and as Kaldis and his partner investigate, all trails lead to a conspiracy to influence the future location of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (at either Mount Athos in Greece or somewhere in Russia). The mystery is secondary here to island and church history, described in interesting detail by various characters. In fact, I'd say read this book for the setting more than the mystery. The characters are a bit too quick with repartee to be completely believable, but, the book is great beach reading or entertainment for an evening before the fire. (Read in galley format via netgalley.com. The book will be published in January 2011.)