Justice will be done, but what kind of justice? High on the slopes
of Mount Parnassus, near the ancient Temple of Apollo, a group of
young idealists protest against the despoiling of the planet
outside a European governmental conference. Inside, corporate
business lobbyists mingle with lawmakers, seeking profit and
influence. Then the charismatic leader of the protest goes missing.
The next day the body of a local woman is discovered in a temple
building, placed like an offering to the old gods. Attending the
conference Cassandra Fortune, civil servant, former GCHQ
investigator and envoy of the British Prime Minister, is co-opted
onto the case by the Professor, a senior Greek politician. She is
to work alongside Ministerial Security Chief Iraklidis and local
policeman Alex Ganas, who are soon joined by Major Lykaios from
regional police headquarters. But the police do not trust each
other, each fearing that the others are members of a banned,
right-wing organisation, Golden Dawn. And they see no reason to
trust Cassie. Only a day later another corpse is found, bloodied
and broken, at the foot of the cliffs which tower above the Temple,
from which blasphemers once were cast. At the behest of the
Professor Cassie and her interpreter, Helena, begin questioning the
conference goers and quickly discover that some have their own,
hidden agendas and reasons to deceive. As a storm closes in,
strange lights are seen on the mountain. Cassie, meanwhile,
believes that someone is stalking her, watching her every move. She
is followed on the lonely walk to the conference centre at midnight
and high above the Corycian Cave, inhabited since the Bronze Age,
show signs of more recent occupation. Who is the walker in the
mountain mist? When an avalanche isolates the conference centre and
all power is cut, preventing communication with the outside world,
it is up to Cassie and the others to find the killer. Are primal
forces reaching out from the past and will the ancient and brutal
Furies claim their blood vengeance? Or will the forces of law
discover the key lies in a tangled, modern web of tragedy and guilt
as relentless and fatal as in any Greek drama. Like the famously
cryptic Oracle of Delphi, Cassandra Fortune must provide answers
before the conference ends, or fail in her first mission for the
Prime Minister. And Cassie herself has her own furies, or demons,
to face. When the characters in the drama transfer to Athens where
the public inquiry into the deaths takes place, the stage is set to
reveal a story of youthful rebellion, desire and betrayal and there
are further surprises in store for Cassie. Oracle is about justice,
from the brutal, archaic form of blood vengeance prevalent in early
human societies to modern systems of law and jurisprudence, set in
the context of a democracy. This is the law and equality under the
law which allows democracy to thrive and underpins the freedoms and
safeguards for individuals within it. The story is interlinked with
Greece's past, as the ancient cradle of democracy and source of
many of western ideas of government, but also to its more recent
and violent past of military strongmen and authoritarianism in the
twentieth century. Oracle also considers, in the form of a crime
thriller, the politicisation of the police and the justice system
and how that will undermine justice, especially following the
banning of Golden Dawn, the now criminal organisation which wrapped
itself in the mantle of politics. It touches on the new academic
discipline of zemiology, the study of 'crime' through the prism of
the harm it does to people, especially those without power.
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