The Empress's Wake
A Mediterranean cruise. A reliquary missing for a thousand years. A retired history teacher who reads the footnotes everyone else skipped.
About the book
When a young influencer is found dead in his cabin aboard the MV Calliope, retired history teacher Martha Bancroft finds herself drawn into a mystery stretching back a thousand years — to a lost Byzantine reliquary and the ruthless network willing to kill for it.
Martha has spent forty-one years teaching teenagers to read carefully. The skill, it turns out, is useful at sea as well as in the classroom — and the Mediterranean keeps its secrets only as long as nobody bothers to look in the footnotes.
A passage
She grew, Martha observed, the way certain pieces of architecture grew — the way the dome of a basilica grew as one walked toward it across a piazza. At half a mile, the ship had been a toy. At a quarter mile, she had become a small handsome yacht. At two hundred yards, she revealed herself as a ship proper — long, low, very white, trim as a knife blade, her single raked stack lit now from within by the warm yellow light of her salon windows.
— from The Empress's Wake (Chapter Two)