In this absorbing, suspenseful novel Julia Kristeva combines social
satire, medieval history, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and
autobiography within a gruesome murder mystery. Murder in Byzantium
deftly moves from eleventh-century Europe, wracked by the turbulence of
the First Crusade, to the sun-dappled, cultural wasteland of present-day
Santa Varvara, threatened by religious cults, gangs, and a serial killer
on the loose.
This killer is murdering members of a dubious religious sect, the New
Pantheon, and leaving a mysterious figure eight drawn on their corpses.
Meanwhile, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a noted professor of human
migrations, clandestinely writing a novel about the Byzantine
princess-historian Anna Comnena, disappears on a quest to learn more
about an ancestor who roamed across Europe to Byzantium during the First
Crusade. Kristeva's recurring characters, detective Northrop Rilsky and
the French journalist Stephanie Delacour, step in and desperately try to
piece together the two-part mystery in the midst of their unexpected
love affair.
In the tradition of Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and Ian McEwan, Kristeva
skillfully weaves philosophical and critical ideas into her fiction.
Peering into the mores, obsessions, and excesses of contemporary
society, Kristeva offers an engrossing portrait of Santa Varvara, a
paradoxical place of sunshine and pollution where skeletons lurk in the
closets of politicians and oil company executives. Her descriptions of
the First Crusade and the Byzantine Empire vividly evoke a distant past
while speaking to such contemporary concerns as immigration,
fundamentalism, terrorism, and the East-West divide. Murder in Byzantium
is also the only work in which Kristeva explores her Bulgarian roots. In
the midst of this rich, multilayered historical novel, Kristeva also
presents three stunning, closely observed, and interlocking portraits of
characters struggling with loss and emptiness in their personal
histories and day-to-day lives.
