Finished
The Road to Ithaca by
Ben Pastor, 5th/10th in her Martin Bora series, this one set in occupied Crete in 1941, which I am very impressed that the library managed to get and set aside for me so quickly, considering that it was still just “or order” when I put a hold on it last week. I guess this is the busman's holiday adventure of the lot, where what should have been a simple gofer errand for a junior assistant officer turns into yet another life-risking crime-solving case once the local Wehrmacht branch decides to stick the visiting newbie with the potentially embarrassing thing that needs to be seen to be dealt with for international relations reasons, but which none of them actually want to handle, leaving Bora to his own devices.
It's actually pretty entertaining to watch Bora try to get by without his usual support level of military backing and resources from an entrenched official position and the familiarity of having made a network of connections, local or otherwise. Or even knowing the language, since modern Greek has… mutated somewhat from the Ancient Greek he got top marks in school for. (Something I discovered myself a few years ago when attempting to learn to read Modern Greek, which has apparently ditched all but 3 vowel sounds, but kept the 8 or so different ways to spell them out of orthographic etymology reasons, and also now does things like use the not particularly intuitive letter combination ντ to represent what used to be the sound of δ, because they went and changed that to the sound of θ, instead of using actual θ, for reasons I still don't understand.)
Anyway, another interesting and enjoyable adventure, with a good mix of actual case-solving (this was another one of the buddy cop ones doing reluctant team-ups with the locals) dealing with more international issues this time around, as well as Bora's continuing personal evolution, mirrored in various classical allusions to ancient Greek literature, which was a nice touch. I suppose this is the end of the line until I learn to read enough Italian to try the translated original-publication versions and/or Bitter Lemon Press brings forth another few volumes of the author's English-written manuscripts, hopefully.
