Murder in Byzantium

Moving from the First Crusade to the sun-dappled, cultural wasteland of present-day Santa Varvara, Julia Kristeva's deftly-plotted, multilayered novel tells a suspenseful tale of perversity and loss. In the eleventh-century, a serial killer murders the members of a dubious religious sect called the New Pantheon, leaving a mysterious figure eight drawn on their corpses. In the present, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a noted professor of human migrations, disappears while on a quest to learn more about his ancestor who roamed across Europe during the First Crusade. Detective Northrop Rilsky and French journalist Stephanie Delacour are on the case, trying desperately to piece together the two-part mystery in the midst of an unexpected love affair. In the tradition of A. S. Byatt, Susan Sontag, and Ian McEwan, Kristeva writes an engrossing and sophisticated thriller that closely observes the mores, obsessions, and excesses of two temporally distinct yet surprisingly intimate worlds.