Lord of the Dark Lake

by Ron Faust

Overview

Jay Chandler, an American archaeologist excavating an ancient Greek temple, is surprised to find himself invited to a weeklong party on an exotic island paradise owned by eccentric tycoon Alexander Krisos. The annual event—swarmed with European nobility, Texas oilmen, ballerinas and bullfighters, millionaire politicos in exile, Japanese potentates, artists, and gorgeous models—is the sort of orgiastic party many would kill to attend. But no one really expects murder to become part of the festivities . . . until it does. From the party’s start under the bright Aegean sky to the finale in the island’s underworld of dark caves, the guests are pulled to their destinies by a force as powerful as any invoked by the Greek gods—and Chandler must confront a Minotaur as deadly as the mythic one.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620454428
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	02/05/2014
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

RON FAUST is the author of fourteen previous thrillers. He has been praised for his “rare and remarkable talent” (Los Angeles Times), and several of his books have been optioned for films. Before he began writing, he played professional baseball and worked at newspapers in Colorado Springs, San Diego, and Key West.

http://www.turnerpublishing.com/RonFaust.aspx

Read an Excerpt

I looked seaward. His “monster wave” was rapidly approaching. It was third in the long line of swells rushing silently across the dark expanse of sea. Krisos’s chosen wave did not now appear any bigger than the ones before and behind it. They all rolled swiftly inward. The first of the three entered the cove and crashed foaming against the base of the cliff, and a moment later a great stream of spume exploded out of the blowhole and gradually dispersed, fogging the air.

“This is the moment,” Alexander said. “Always. Isn’t it, Jay? When you’ve bet it all.”

I turned to look at him. His stance was casual and he met my gaze with a quick smile that acknowledged our complicity. I had no reservations now. I was his accomplice in this foolish stunt. Let him leap; let him fall; let him live or die. Everything was so dreary, so boring, until Krisos arrived, and then one’s interior vision was altered, sleeping emotions were aroused, and life repossessed its clarity and peril and fun.

The wave, his wave, had entered the cove. I now saw that it really was bigger than the others, a seething graybeard that remained concave as it rolled on another fifty yards and then cracked like a whip as it collapsed, cracked again when its surge met the rock wall (I dropped my arm and shouted, “Go!”), and cracked once more as, violently compressed, it exploded out of the blowhole. Alexander was falling then, windmilling his arms for balance, and he fell slowly (it seemed) through the spume and mistfog and entered the water straight and clean a yard beyond the half-ring of sharp rocks. The splash lifted thirty feet into the air. A boiling mushroom of water appeared at his entry point. I stood on the edge of the cliff and watched it seethe.

What People are Saying About This

David Morrell

The kind of stunning writer you want to keep recommending.

From the Publisher

“Confirming Faust as a novelist to be reckoned with, this intricate omnium-gatherum, told in chiseled prose, seduces the reader with both wit and passion.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A writer of enormous talent, a stylist to admire and a storyteller of great power.”
 —Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

“Faust writes beautifully . . . he reminds you of Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen. . . . Faust has it all: lyrical prose, complex characters and provocative plots.”
—Booklist

“Faust’s clear, unadorned prose and his deft, pure characterization ring with the force of Hemingway or Graham Greene.”
—Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Set on an isolated private Greek island and echoing siren choruses from classical mythology, Faust's imaginative fifth novel (after Fugitive Moon, 1995) roils with Oedipal passion. When young American archeologist Jay Chandler is summoned by his mentor, the fabulously wealthy Alexander Krisos, to excavate and restore the ruins of the ancient temple of Poseidon, he finds himself the unwitting pawn in a diabolical reenactment of a classic Greek tragedy. Goaded into diving off a cliff and fighting a bull, Jay is driven to confront his demons through exercises of self-examination. At the annual, week-long orgiastic party at the exotic estate of the malevolent and egomaniacal Greek tycoon, a series of seemingly unrelated deaths stir explosive tensions among the guests. Pursued by Krisos's daughter, whom Jay considers a sister, the archeologist is caught up in a maelstrom of conflicting loyalties. When the party culminates in a theatrical reenactment of Theseus's duel with the Minotaur staged deep within the island's labyrinthine network of caves, Jay and other characters are brought to a final moments of truth. Confirming Faust as a novelist to be reckoned with, this intricate omnium-gatherum, told in chiseled prose, seduces the reader with both wit and passion. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

When archaeologist Jay Chandler accepts an invitation to visit a billionaire Greek friend's island to restore an ancient temple, he finds himself a pawn in an elaborate tragedy. A wild, week-long party with celebrity guests, bullfights, mysterious deaths, the billionaire's dysfunctional family, and an oedipal play that ends with a murderous minotaur in caves beneath the island all emphasize classical analogies gone wrong. Faust, a former pro baseball player and newspaper reporter, wrote half a dozen novels before 1983, then four in the last four years (e.g., Fugitive Moon, LJ 4/1/95). He is a Homeric storyteller with an eye for the odd character and a fine gift for Spartan description. Recommended for all fiction collections.Roland C. Person, Southern Illinois University Lib., Carbondale

Library Journal

A wonderful writer with a firm grip on character, setting, and pace.

Times Washington

Deadly shenanigans on a mad billionaire's private island.

How mad? Well, just after he's returned from his latest voyage working a tramp steamer incognito, Alexander Krisos offers his son's friend Jay Chandler, the archeologist who's working on the nearby temple of Poseidon, $100,000 to throw himself into the sea at the cliff path where another guest missed his footing and took a fatal header—and then, when Chandler politely declines, takes the plunge himself. (Later, Chandler, just to prove that he's not much saner than his longtime patron, dives in after all.) It looks like an eventful week, even before the guests arrive for Krisos's annual summer bash: His discarded wife Sophia still lives in a humble cottage nearby; daughter Maria, whom Chandler thinks of virtually as a sister, keeps coming on to him despite his manly refusals; her paralyzed brother Nico throws a drink in his face. With hosts this special, expectations run high, especially after elderly pederast Simon Rye, Krisos's literary consultant, is killed and thrown into a cistern (and that's only the beginning of his corpse's adventures). But soon after the arrival of British actress Pamela Bristol, bullfighting scion Antonio Aguilar, Texas mogul Jack Clyde Black and his wife Poochy, Madonna wannabe Gypsy Marr, deposed African dictator Biki Benematale, SS protégé Jürgen Leuger, and the rest of the high- profile guests, you realize it's more of the same: endless sinister portents, punctuated only by excerpts from the dossiers Krisos's security chief has compiled on the guests, and the occasional gory fatality. Under this kind of pressure, the guests, who are obviously meant to be fascinating monsters, turn poignantly helpless, as if they were doomed to wait forever at the station for a plot that never quite arrived. Long before the finale—a tingly updating of Theseus' adventures in the Minotaur's cave—these caricatures, who would have been perfectly adequate one of Faust's potboilers, collapse of mythic inflation.

Memo to the author (Fugitive Moon, 1995, etc.): Stick to overplotted actioners.

Kirkus Reviews

Confirming Faust as a novelist to be reckoned with, this intricate omnium-gatherum, told in chiseled prose, seduces the reader with both wit and passion.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A writer of enormous talent, a stylist to admire and a storyteller of great power.”
 —Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

“Faust writes beautifully . . . he reminds you of Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen. . . . Faust has it all: lyrical prose, complex characters and provocative plots.”
—Booklist

“Faust’s clear, unadorned prose and his deft, pure characterization ring with the force of Hemingway or Graham Greene.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher