Publishers Weekly
This first novel by the Scottish author of the well-received novella collection Several Deceptions is an unusual mixture of genres: part thriller, part social comedy and part, as the cunningly punning title suggests, a study of how a variety of different people make unexpected connections in a great city. The story revolves around an elderly Greek banker, Mr. Eugenides, living alone in an odd corner of the city, who is the only living link to what may be a considerable treasure, in artifacts and real estate, linked to a Greek-founded London church destroyed in the WWII blitz. An unscrupulous, snobby young lawyer learns of it and becomes involved with some cold-blooded Greek plotters in a scheme to confuse the old man and wrest the treasures from him. Meanwhile, Eugenides is befriended by Sebastian, a dashing, gay scholar of Greek antiquities who shares his love for classical poets. The plot lines converge when Jeanene Malone, a forthright young Australian student of Sebastian's, working part-time as a pharmacist, becomes suspicious of a prescription she is asked to fill by the crooked Greeks. Throw in Jeanene's Indian lawyer lover; Alicia, a cheerful crusader for open spaces who hopes to salvage the church site as a community garden; her ever-hungry dog Alice; Sebastian's rather square lover, Giles; and a climactic motorcycle chase through Gloucestershire, and you have a fair idea of the range of character and incident that crowds Stevenson's ebullient creation. It is rather overstuffed, in fact, but written with such tenderness, wit and brio, and deep affection for London and its people, that it is irresistible. National advertising. (Sept. 7) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Stevenson, whose novella collection Several Deceptions was favorably compared to the works of A.S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch, has written a tantalizing mystery. At its center is the discovery of an outrageously valuable piece of ruined property in the center of London, most recently owned by a Greek church. This forgotten real estate contains treasure both territorial and intellectual, and the elderly and reclusive caretaker is soon discovered and cultivated simultaneously by an endearing gay classicist, Sebastian, and the morally bankrupt team of grasping lawyer Edward and enigmatic and remorseless Lamprini, foes with quite different aims. The circle of intrigue inevitably comes to encompass a small clutch of young Londoners and foreigners, their eyes on the prize with quite a variety of goals in mind. From the first pages, in which the threads of disparate lives quite reasonably begin to weave around the treasure in a soundly classic plot, to the climax, a semi-comic chase uniting everyone including Alice the dog, the story satisfies. An evocative and witty romp through modern London, for all libraries. Margee Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Interesting characters, an agreeable setting-contemporary London-and accomplished writing, all are folded together into an overstuffed first novel about a group of men and women who find love and purpose as they save an old garden and capture a greedy lawyer who's taken to crime. When Edward Lupset, an impoverished young lawyer and old Etonian who yearns for the finer things of life, learns that a distinguished Greek family is unaware of the treasures put into a vault during the London blitz by the family's British lawyer Mr. Eugenides, he decides to acquire them for himself. With the help of two young Greek professionals who share similar ambitions, he befriends the aging Mr. Eugenides, who lives alone in an old house in an ancient part of London, and begins to doctor his medications with pills that will induce confusion. But Edward, a louche and graceless snob, hasn't reckoned with Dr. Sebastian Raphael, a gay Byzantine scholar, whom Eugenides has permitted to copy a long lost sixth-century homoerotic poem. Or with Jeanene Malone, an Australian classics graduate student who overhears the Greeks plotting; or Dil Dhesi, an astute colleague of Edward's; or Hattie Luke, who's trying to save a garden on the site of an old bombed-out church whose land belongs to a Greek monastery on Mount Athos. As they get wind of Edward's machinations, Mr. Eugenides dies, Prince Charles invites the abbot of the monastery to visit, and Jeanene, Dil, and Sebastian all find skullduggery and love en route to a leisurely, ungripping final curtain. An energetic debut that tries to be too many things as it celebrates the varieties of love, solves a crime, and comments on the need for historic preservation incool Britannia.
