THE MODERN WORLD
TO
ANCIENT MYTH

Wassahatchka County — Annalee Sumpter’s Motel

A mysterious murder at her grandmother’s motel leads Midge and her partner Jake into an investigation of colorful local characters and the dangerous seamy underside of life in a small Florida town.

Wassahatchka County — Indian Mound

The body of a site director is found in a trench dug into an old Indian mound, but no one seems to know how it got there. It’s up to Midge and Jake to sort through all the complexities of archaeological excavations to find the perpetrator.

Wassahatchka County — St. John’s Church

Three local figures are found dead, attached to crosses in front of a small local church. Investigating the murders takes Midge and Jake deep into the world of religious and political extremism.

Wassahatchka County — The Burger Barn

A discharged army veteran is found dead in an alleyway behind a local hamburger joint. Investigating the potential murder leads Midge and Jake into the world of homeless, unemployed veterans and the Wassahatchka County park system.

Wassahatchka County — Hardware Store

A chalk outline with no body appears outside a mom-and-pop hardware store. Inside, detectives Midge Sumpter and Jake Leon discover a severed ear in a plastic bag on the glue aisle. Soon, more body parts turn up — including one in the tailpipe of their own cruiser — leading them into a race against time and a twisted killer who dismantles victims piece by piece.

Thrinacia

“According to legend, I am the son of Poseidon by the nymph Thoosa. I laugh at this when I hear it. It gives me a certain nobility, I grant, but I am no more the son of a god than you are.”
— Polyphemus

Crete (Knossos)

The Minotaur of legend was a mighty beast with the body of a man and the head of a bull. According to the ancient myths, he was the product of an illicit union between Queen Pasiphae of Crete and a beautiful white bull with which she had fallen in love. Myths, of course, can invent all manner of odd tales, however bizarre and unlikely.

But what if the myth were based on a set of real facts — a young boy with hypertrichosis or “Wolfman’s disease,” whom nobody at court can accept? What if, in a fit of cruel rage, his real father, King Minos, builds a special prison to house him until his death — to keep him out of the glorious court at Knossos? Pasiphae’s coupling with the bull becomes a legend, the only story Minos can accept, for to embrace the boy as his own son is unthinkable. There, in his lonely labyrinth, Asterion, for that is his actual name, meets a young girl, a victim put there by Minos for the Minotaur to “eat.”

Athens

Socrates, the great Greek philosopher widely considered to be the father of the Western philosophical tradition, really did have a wife. Her name was Xanthippe, and she was 35 years younger than her famous husband. Socrates was born in 470 BCE; Xanthippe in 435 BCE. She has come down in history as a terrible shrew, and is even mentioned by Petruchio in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, who refers to Kate “as Socrates’ Xanthippe or . . . worse.”

But few people have ever told Xanthippe’s side of the story. What would her memoir be like were she to tell us herself? What was it like being married to a man so much older than she was and seen by many as something of a public nuisance? What was it like living in Athens during the nearly endless Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), in which Athens suffered terribly? Mostly, what was it like being an intelligent, able young woman in an era when women were not considered citizens and couldn’t participate in most civic affairs? What would it be like to live with the irony that your city, Athens, is named after the goddess of wisdom, Athena, but you are not considered worthy to have a role in government? Now, Xanthippe tells her own side of things.

Sparta (Southern Peloponnesus) and Troy (Northeastern Turkey)

Like Polyphemus, the Cyclops, and Asterion, the Minotaur, Helen is a figure of myth — the most beautiful woman in the world, the “face that launched a thousand ships” as Christopher Marlowe wrote. We know, however, that there really could have been a war that brought down the ancient city of Troy (now the mound of Hisarlik) around 1180 BCE, just at the end of the Bronze Age. Suppose, then, that the characters from the Homeric epic, The Iliad, had been real? There would be no actual gods, goddesses, nymphs, or sorceresses, although the people themselves would have believed in them.

What there would have been is real people living real lives through a turbulent and bloody era of warfare and change. If one of those people had been Helen, and if she were to tell the story of her life from the perspective of her old age, what would she tell? What would she tell of knowing Menelaus, Paris, Priam, and Hecuba, Hector and Andromache, Cassandra, Odysseus, even Achilles and Briseis? What would she say about the war and the great horse? In this novel, she tells the story of her life, and all these people were part of it.