The Salvor's Chart
A returned letter from the Cretan coast. A dive supervisor dead in his workshop. Thirty-five years of careful logbooks, five missing pages, and a fourteenth-century icon a careful network has been willing to kill to keep unrecovered.
About the book
Martha Bancroft is seventy-four, retired, and the most careful reader in any room she enters. When a letter she sent to a dive supervisor on the Cretan coast comes back unopened — and the man it was addressed to is found dead in his workshop — she reads the postmark twice. Manolis Kourakis had spent thirty-five years on the water. He knew how to annotate his own equipment, stow his gear, and document what he found. He also knew, it seems, when to keep quiet about it. The morning his body was discovered, the gear in his shed had been moved. The pathologist's report noted no irregularities. Martha noted several.
What begins as a trip to a colleague's wedding on the Greek coast becomes something considerably harder to set aside: a trail of documents running from a Swiss indictment to a Venetian archive in Chania, five logbook pages from a summer dive season in 2018, and the nine-year disappearance of a marble-faced fourteenth-century Cretan icon. From Marblehead to the ferry crossings of the Adriatic, to the limestone backstreets of Chania and the stone villages above the Libyan Sea, The Salvor's Chart follows Martha across the eastern Mediterranean and into the centre of a cultural property crime that reaches from a Swiss financial indictment to a Cretan dive boat fire — and to a dead man who knew everything and told no one.
A passage
She knew it before she had finished opening the front door: her own pale blue airmail paper, her own hand on the address, the two international stamps she had licked at the kitchen table twelve days ago and carried to the post box at the corner of Front Street in the early afternoon. It was face-down in the slot, turned by some postal habit she had encountered before — the small deference of routing staff who understood, without thinking about it, that the news on one side of an envelope is different from the news on the other.
— from The Salvor's Chart (Chapter Three)