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About
Stratos Gazis hates being called a hit man. What he is, is a conscientious fixer. He fixes problems that few can fix. Things that people are willing to pay handsomely to get done provided he concludes the targets deserve their fate. The story centers around the blue-eyed orphan Emma, the "baby blue" of the title, a beautiful teenage girl with a talent for card tricks of exceptional sophistication – all the more impressive for her tender years and the blindness that has afflicted her since the age of eight. Emma and her adoptive father, a former investigative journalist, roam the streets of Athens together, earning enough to keep body and soul together by performing Chaplinesque sketches. When the ex-journalist is brutally murdered, Angelino, a well-connected Athenian underworld figure, takes the girl under his wing and retains the services of Stratos to find her father's killers. Meanwhile, Costas Dragas, a top homicide cop and Gazis's best friend, has taken on the investigation of a spate of murders of pedophiles, and as usual, has gone to war with the media. It slowly emerges that their cases intersect and that corporate interests, more powerful than they could ever have imagined, lie behind the murders they both need to solve. Through a combination of experience and the ability to read the ailing city, its residents and its streets with consummate skill, the case is solved, but not without some subliminal tutoring from a great classic of the cinema.
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Reviews
"The novel is a 'floodlight', subjecting the seamy underbelly of the media, politics, the justice system and financial interests to the intense scrutiny of its author, whose intricate plot reveals how dangerously interconnected these areas of contemporary life are."
ArtsandtheCity.gr
"A portrayal of a city that is at once a mere shadow of its (alarmingly recent) former self and of one that is constantly redefining and adapting itself to accommodate its nouveau poor. The sights, sounds and smells of the crisis are all vividly drawn in this novel, which it is a worthy successor to the first title."
arts21Century.gr
"Koutsakis revives the ailing body of Greek crime fiction as he respects the basic tenets of noir fiction while at the same time has the capacity and vision to renew the form. He is particularly adept at recording and decoding a city that has been transformed like no other that is not in a war zone in the space of just a few years."
presspublica.gr
Extended Details
- SeriesStratos Gazis #1