Set in present-day Athens, Russian Doll is in part a classic "whodunit," in part a political thriller, and in part an insightful meditation on the nature of friendship, identity, loyalty, and obligation. Captain Yannis Lavonis, himself a man with a past, investigates the brutal murder of a young Norwegian, Karen Andersen. A methodical man, Lavonis asks himself the first professional question of a cop, namely, who was the victim. From a Rashomon-like battery of lovers, acquaintances, and potential suspects, he gets a bewildering variety of answers. Karen Andersen was a dedicated Zionist, a committed partisan of the Palestinian cause, a woman of the left and the right, a woman with no politics at all; a nymphomaniac, a lesbian, and a virgin; a delicate beauty and a healthy breeder. There was every reason to kill her; there was none at all. The unfolding mystery takes us to Vienna and Oslo, which Vardamis describes, as she does Athens, with a deft hand, and finally to the bleakly beautiful landscape of the Mani. Lavonis enters a shadow world of espionage and terrorism, the crossroads of which is Black April, a band of assassins who kill with apparent impunity. The more interesting Lavonis' investigation becomes, however, the more resistance he encounters to it. Only by stealth is he able to keep his evidence from being impounded and to give it proper forensic testing. The funds he requests for travel are denied. The official reason is that the case only involves a foreigner, and is not worth a lengthy pursuit. In Norway, he finds similar official disinterest. Lavonis understands these warnings well enough; this is a case not meant to be cleared. He's a man of sixty, and retirement is not far off. He's also a man whose career has not advanced as far as it might have, perhaps through a certain excess of honesty, and who is therefore not privy to certain secrets of state. In a sense he has nothing to lose by pursuing his stubborn virtue, but in a sense he risks everything. For Lavonis, then, this case is a decisive crossroads, though he only gradually comes to perceive it. He can fully justify himself by professional standards: murders should be solved, wherever the trail may lead. His bloodhound's curiosity is also aroused by the circumstances of the case, and his human sympathy by the brutality of the crime. He cannot abandon the chase without violating his code, his instincts, and his inmost moral compass. Is this not mixed with a certain unacknowledged bitterness over the relative failure of his career, and a desire to strike back at the shadowy authority that has stymied it? Is Lavonis not challenged, in fact, to reconstruct his own personal story as well? As a good detective he knows that solving a case means exposing some part of oneself. When the stakes are total, however, the exposure will be total as well. So Vardamis' hero enters, at first unwittingly, his own past. It is not one that is without its own skeletons. Lavonis' career has included service under the Junta, which he had rationalized to himself at the time with the thought that even governments that deny freedom cannot altogether do without justice, at least on the rudimentary level of ordinary police work. His rectitude soon brought him up against the brutal reality of serving a dictatorship, and led to his own imprisonment-more of a career impediment, perhaps, than forthright accommodation to a criminal regime might have been. Now, once again, he faces the dilemma of being forced to go against conscience. This time it involves not a direct order from an authority he tolerates but does not respect, but a series of subtle roadblocks by a state no better and no worse than any other , at least to ordinary perception. This time, it is a matter of deciding whether any order is legitimate when it crosses conscience. The recollection of his imprisonment, and the circumstances that bring it to mind, confronts Lavonis with his most deeply repressed memory, a moment of compassion that is also one of betrayal. It is a moment he will be compelled to repeat in the present, but far more terribly. The book's shattering climax reveals to Lavonis that he, like Oedipus, is ultimately the man he seeks. Black April is, of course, a stand-in for November 17, the terrorist organization whose brazen career has suggested to many the complicity of successive Greek governments in its activities. Vardamis takes these speculations a step further. Hers is a work of fiction, of course, but it is precisely fiction that licenses us to see what we believe but cannot prove. What is certain is that the clouds of an unmastered past hang over Greece, and that the legacy of the civil war and the Junta is far from spent. Vardamis' success in evoking the gulfs that lie beneath the seemingly placid surface of contemporary Greek life is not the least of her achievements in this book. The price of truth, as Yannis Lavonis learns, may well be oblivion, but that of deceit is a corruption that cankers the soul. Like the image of its title, Russian Doll is many-layered; unlike it, however, what is revealed at the end is not a reduction but a vision that is both penetrating and ample. In the form of a policier, Frances Vardamis has written a challenging and compelling book about modern Greece and the ghosts that haunt it.

Greek Police Captain Yannis Lavonis is spiritual kin to Hercule Poirot,Sam Spade, and James Bond. The plot involves a Norwegian murder victim whose husband is an American diplomat and whose lovers are from many countries and political persuasions. The novel provides a sharp, realistic evocation of both present-day Greece and Norway. This book is especially suited for the reader who enjoys international complications and political intrigue. The suspense continues up until the final page. A must read for anyone interested in contemporary Greek politics.