Summer Reading: A Review of The Taint of Midas by Anne Zouroudi

Crystal blue sea, hot sand, sleepy villages with garrulous old men drinking ouzo in outside cafés, badly built tourist hotels and other monstrosities of modern development, corrupt police, and ancient Greek myths that won’t go away—Zouroudi certainly knows Greece and creates a lovingly detailed portrait as she slowly unrolls her murder mystery. In a world of frenetically-paced thrillers, Taint of Midas has the cadences of a lazy afternoon nap in a hammock—just the thing if you’re suffering from an overdose of busy life.

Here’s a sample of Zouroudi’s descriptive language taken from the opening of chapter six:
“The village of Koskinou lay three miles further inland, where flat, dry fields of olive trees spread around modest houses with views to the distant hills. Chickens scratched in the dirt of well-tended vegetable gardens, goats were tethered on the roadside verges; a vintage tractor rusted by a woodpile, and a hobbled donkey waited, head bowed by an open chapel gate.

The few small businesses on the square … were closed. A wooden bench circled the trunk of a spreading plane tree, and in the summer the old men liked to sit here in its shade, littering the ground with cigarette butts, enjoying the coffee and ouzo they fetched from the kafenion; but this morning the old men were all absent.”

Taint of Midas is the second of Zouroudi’s “seven deadly sins” mystery series. As you might guess from the title—Midas, after all, begged Dionysius for the golden touch and then discovered what a curse it was when he had changed his children into golden statues, his daily bread into inedible treasure, water into a lethal stream—Zouroudi weaves her mystery from the theme of men’s greed. As with Midas, there are deadly consequences when the men in her book grasp for riches and commercial success without taking heed to family, love, and the fine delights of fishing, savoring a bottle of good wine, and growing vegetables. It’s a timeless theme, and Zouroudi does a good job of bringing it home to us through her clever echoing of Greek mythology and her vivid depiction of modern Greek life.

Her mysterious “sleuth” Hermes Diaktoros—referred to as “the fat man” throughout the novel—appears to share in the immortal knowledge of the gods at times, his fingers apparently in many pots, both seen and unseen, giving him advantages over the two likeable local policemen who help him solve the mystery of who killed old Gabrilis Kaloyeros, the aged beekeeper and owner of a plot of land with lovely sea views and ancient ruins, along with a few other mysteries that Zouroudi unwinds in the course of her book.

The American edition of Taint of Midas will be published later this July.