Review Rating
With the October 2004 review, we began rating the books on the basis of one to four trowels;
one trowel= don’t bother, to four trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
The Disappearance of Ophelia Blue by Vanessa Gordon
Reviewed on: January 1, 2025
Pomeg Books: Berkshire UK
2022 (PB)
The fourth Martin Day mystery continues the winning combination of elements that made the first three volumes so enjoyable: a puzzling mystery that challenges the skills of our reluctant hero, Martin Day, while at the same time introducing the reader to the natural beauty and the historical wonders of the Greek Cyclades, and the island of Naxos in particular. Martin and author Helen Atchison have returned to Naxos after a winter in London, having determined that they are, in fact, a romantic couple rather than simply good friends. They will live in Martin’s idyllic house in Filoti—Helen to work on her next novel and Martin to develop a television series featuring major archaeological sites throughout Greece, among other on-going projects. After the dangers and intrigue he recently encountered (related in the first three volumes of the series), Martin finds himself looking forward to quiet and contemplative life of an itinerant scholar and ardent lover.
His reverie is interrupted when he is contacted by Ophelia Blue, a classics scholar at Cambridge University. She will be traveling to Naxos and would very much appreciate Martin’s help in solving a “professional puzzle.” The request presents Martin with a bit of a conundrum in that, while as a graduate student at Cambridge some twenty years earlier, he had the young Ophelia as a tutor, but they had also become passionate lovers for a brief time until the relationship crumbled. There had been no contact in the intervening years until now.
The understanding and worldly-wise Helen urges Martin to agree to Ophelia’s request and together the two meet the Cambridge scholar at her rented rooms near Chora, the capital of Naxos. Ophelia, still a great beauty after some twenty years, fills Martin in on the years since they were at Cambridge together: She had married Tim Mitchell, a Yorkshireman and doctoral candidate in Greek Bronze Age studies; had adopted a young Nepalese boy named Raj; and permanently separated from Mitchell some four years earlier. But for whatever reason, Ophelia wished to put off the discussion of her “professional puzzle” until the next day when they would reconvene at Martin’s favorite taverna, the Diogenes Bar. But Ophelia failed to meet them and investigations by both Martin and the police draw a blank; she has simply disappeared. The mystery deepens when Martin receives a package, postmarked from Naxos, that includes an inexpensively printed hardback book with a note from Ophelia that asks him to study the book and an enclosed letter in the hopes that he “with all your intelligence and curiosity, will make out the truth. Do this for me, please Martin, for old times sake.” The enclosed letter, dated some twenty years earlier was from one Christos Nikolaidis to the director of the British School at Athens, thanking him for supporting Christos’ search for the Kallos of Naxian folklore. The book, entitled The Beauty, a Cycladic Place, proved to be the controversial narrative of Christos’ passion to discover the Kallos, or “Beauty” of lore and legend, which would prove to be on “international historical importance.” Christos’ one-man crusade came to a tragic end when he apparently drowned, although the body had never been recovered.
Martin is certain that Ophelia believed that Christos Nikolaidis was indeed on to something very real in his quixotic search for the long lost “Beauty,” and that she further believed that Martin, given his earlier successes at solving archaeological mysteries, was the ideal person to complete Christos” quest. What Martin failed to realize was that such a quest could open wounds, both physical and emotional—some going back twenty years.
The Disappearance of Ophelia Blue is satisfying in many ways; it presents an archaeological puzzle that is more than plausible. But it also continues the charming and lovingly rendered descriptions of life on the ageless islands of the Cyclades. Even while knee-deep in solving a mystery whose origins may go back to the Greek Bronze Age, Martin Day never misses an opportunity to dine on magnificent Greek cuisine or quaff a glass of ouzo or a refreshing gin and tonic!
Four trowels for The Disappearance of Ophelia Blue and may there be many more Martin Day mysteries in the years to come!
