Fact in Fiction - Part 2 of 5

Here is some insight into the research of  
Sirocco, Storm over Land and Sea -
Book 2 of the Legends of the Winged Scarab series.

For this modern-day quest to find and decipher the ancient Golden Tablets from Book 1, I incorporated real places and timely political events, namely the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. The regrettable chaos it brought to Egypt made many of my fictional events plausible.

In Sirocco, Storm over Land and Sea, my Egyptologist protagonist, the exotic Dr. Naunet Klein, is sent to Cairo and Luxor where she meets a charming stranger. After a weekend invitation to Hurgada, she is kidnapped and spends some days (rather involuntarily) imprisoned in a village on southern Crete.
  
Loutro, then as now, can only be reached by boat or by climbing over a treacherous mountain path.

It is from those cliffs rising straight out of the sea that she witnesses the terrifying demise of a South American by-hook-or-by-crook art collector’s luxury yacht, the Bucanero I. 

On board is a (real) stolen Rembrandt. 

 
(Check out the cover description in the LookInside on Amazon.com). If, by any chance, you know of this painting’s whereabouts (perhaps in your Uncle Guido's safe room), the FBI still promises a huge reward for the recovery of this priceless painting.

Lorenzo, my gangster-art collector, later restores a Russian ghost ship – the real Lyubov Orlova – which he registered as the Bucanero II, out of Caracas.

In Sirocco, we also reconnect with my opportunistic Con Extraordinaire, Edward Guernsey-Crock.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009BQZ1JY

Throughout Books 2-5 of the  
Legends of the Winged Scarab, 
the increasingly less charming Englishman skitters toward his just deserves. 
Is he someone from my past life upon whom I heaped vengeance for wrongs done to me?  

That’s for me to know, for you to imagine – 
and for the indigenous Cretan Kri-Kri 
to keep silent about as they nimbly scale the craggy coast of Crete. 
(Do you spot them in this picture?)

Sirocco, Storm over Land and Sea 
is available at Amazon.com for Kindle and in Print.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008Y6GXZ8   

Excerpt

Dr. William Jefferson Browning, the Boston Museum’s sixty-year-old Head of Research, was never on time. ‘Occupational hazard,’ the Einstein-maned scientist decreed when someone suggested he might think about installing an alarm clock in his lab.

The story went that after a vacation trip to Europe, Bill Browning was overheard to complain at a museum board meeting, that ‘Florence would have been great, except for all those tourists.’ At which point an illustrious member of the old Boston establishment supposedly remarked, ‘And what the hell did you think you were, Bill!’

It provided a rare snicker for the thirty-plus trustees. Over time, their meetings had become more terse than academic, and they welcomed any morsel of good humor thrown their way.

Bingham Adams, the seemingly forever museum director, was affable and well liked. He was an excellent judge of a good brushstroke. There was a saying among the crusty old Bostonians: ‘Before you invite Bingham to dinner, lock up all your Singer Sargents.’ 

More often than not, Adams would walk out of one of those patrician brownstone homes encircling Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill with a host’s unplanned contribution of a stern forefather gazing from his gilded frame.

While this was great for the collections and the museum’s standing in the art world, it became painfully clear that Adams sorely lacked in administrative talents. 

The venerable institution’s cash flow was in dire straits. The board elected a new president.

George Searing, the business-savvy fifty-six-year-old CEO of a fertilizer company, was thick-set, demanding and utterly impervious to the tender psyches of the art world. But he scythed and bullied the Grande Old Dame back into the black. 

Bingham Adams and his curators hated him.

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 Legends Of The Winged Scarab Series:

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