A missing young female journalist from the Balkans, a Greek Cypriot poet and amateur sleuth who runs a bookshop in Astoria, New York, assorted feuding Croatian and Serbian gangsters and a mastermind of international sex trafficking with political ambitions . . . Somehow it all comes together in this debut appearance of a new hero on the mystery scene, Stavros Odysseos. He has his own set of vices but possesses a spirit as generous as that of Aphrodite, the beneficent goddess of Cyprus.