MURDER AT THE PANIONIC GAMES

How might a fanatic and nationalistic interest in athletics flourish even in a culture without corporate sponsorship? Bias, the ironic and unassuming narrator, is the minor priest for the Temple of Poseidon in the city-state of Pirene, host of the Panionic Games, a forerunner to the Olympics, in 650 b.c. It’s bad enough that during the opening ritual, the ox balks at being sacrificed to Poseidon (our opening ceremonies may be overblown, but at least animals are spared). It’s even worse when, following the sacrifice, a ceremonial cup of wine poisons the hometown favorite, Tyrestes, while he’s standing next to Bias. The Greeks believed that physical proximity to a dead man infected the living with a “miasma”—the perfect excuse for the Pirene magistrates to insist that hapless Bias, in the historical absence of any police, investigate the crime. Like the ox, Bias wishes this honor could have passed him by. The suspects are limited to Endemion, Pirene’s second most favored athlete; Endemion’s father Nolarion, magistrate and past Pentathlon champion; two other magistrates; and a group of beautiful single girls, daughters of the city’s most powerful families. When a leading athlete from Miletus is murdered, a follow-up crime that raises the stakes to civil war, Bias barely manages to avoid being sacrificed to thin-skinned aristocrats and repressed young women.

As in more contemporary cozies, Bias spends too much time mulling over motive and alibi, but his wry perspective makes an otherwise conventional debut appealing.