One Last Chance

February 21, 2022
Siger’s fine 12th mystery featuring Chief Insp. Andreas Kaldis (after 2021’s A Deadly Twist) focuses on Andreas’s personal assistant, Maggie Sikestis, who returns to her island home of Ikaria after the death of her 104-year-old grandmother. Ikariots are famous for their longevity, but Maggie soon discovers that a rash of mysterious deaths of elderly islanders is connected to the suspicious activity of a Greek Orthodox priest, two dirty drug enforcement agents, and a Hong Kong pharmaceutical company also under investigation by Andreas’s right-hand man, Det. Yianni Kouros. Though Maggie’s amateur sleuthing brings a cozy element to the story, Siger does a good job of blending in the procedural threads pursued by Yianni and Andreas, and once again the scenery steals the show. Ikaria is the poorest of the Aegean islands and only one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, but its breathtaking beauty radiates from each page. Part travelogue, part cozy, part procedural, this entry will appeal to fans of Donna Leon and Louise Penny with its attractive characters and rich setting.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis, head of the Greek police's Special Crimes Unit, is facing a very strange case. He and his right-hand man, Yanni Kouros, are in the process of tracking down corrupt drug-enforcement agents when Maggie Sikestis, their intrepid administrative assistant, learns that her 104-year-old grandmother has died on the island of Ikaria. When Maggie goes home for the funeral, she discovers that her grandmother had been in good health at the time of her death, and the woman who prepared her for burial noticed a bruise on her arm that could have been caused by a botched I.V. She soon hears about several other elderly people who died around the same time with the same injury. Unwilling to accept that these deaths were from natural causes, she decides to investigate. Meanwhile, Yanni goes to meet a source for his drug case only to witness the source's assassination. When Maggie has a motorbike accident on Ikaria, Yanni travels there to check on her and learns about her grandmother. Not surprisingly, the two cases are linked. As they gradually connect all the dots, Maggie and Yanni lead readers on a fascinating romp through the rugged Ikarian countryside and the convoluted Greek legal bureaucracy. The twelfth installment in this atmospheric and exciting series (following A DeadlyTwist, 2021) is the best yet.

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