"Mysteries of Eleusis"
Mysteries of Eleusis is the fifth and the latest installment in the Aristotle Detective series telling the adventures of Aristotle and Stephanos.
The story starts with Aristotle staying overnight at Stephanos' house. They are rudely awakened by neighbours hammering on Stephanos' door because the house of one of them has been burgled while he was out of the house and his wife was away. For reasons which Doody never makes entirely clear they wish to consult Aristotle about the matter.
Aristotle and Stephanos go to the neighbour's house and there find the neighbour's brother-in-law has been killed by a blow to the head with a round object. This is the first in a series of petty and not so petty thefts which plague Athens, Peiraeus, and Eleusis. Stephanos accuses another neighbour of theft, but surely the thefts cannot all be the work of one man.
In time, the events in this book overlap considerably with those in the previous one, Poison in Athens, to the extent that I wished I'd constructed a time line while I was reading it so as to be able to relate the events in the two books to each other better. I greatly enjoyed the descriptions of Stephanos' symposium and his wedding feast and I couldn't put the book down once the procession of the mystai (those seeking initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries) started off from Athens. Nevertheless, I did feel that this was the weakest of the books in the series to date, for reasons which will need some discussion of plot points, so those who dislike spoilers might want to stop here.
Spoiler Warning
Doody's Aristotle Series
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