Number one New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen last electrified readers with Dead Aim and No One to Trust. Now she offers a new pulse-pounding thriller that takes suspense writing to an all-new level: deep below the surface, where a ruthless killer strikes without warning, without mercy...and with the deadliest intent.
Set in fourth-century B.C. Greece, The Mask of Apollo is narrated by Nikeratos, a tragic actor who takes with him on all his travels a gold mask of Apollo, a relic of the theater's golden age, which is now past. At first his mascot, the mask gradually becomes his conscience, and he refers to it his gravest decisions, when he finds himself at the center of a political crisis in which the philosopher Plato is also involved. Much of the action is set in Syracuse, where Plato's friend Dion is trying to persuade the young tyrant Dionysios the Younger to accept the rule of law. Through Nikeratos' eyes, the reader watches as the clash between the two looses all the pent-up violence in the city.
One calm October day three men set out from Bermagui harbour in a fishing launch and disappeared into the rippleless Tasman Sea. Then the head of one of them, riddled with bullets, is brought up in a ship's trawl--it belonged to Ericson, formerly one of the Big Five at Scotland Yard. Why had he been shot and thrown overboard? Who had killed him? And where were the launchman and his mate? The bush had never defeated Bony but there were no clues in the sepulchre of the sea.
The first instance of pre-computer fractals was noted by the French mathematician Gaston Julia. He wondered what a complex polynomial function would look like, such as the ones named after him (in the form of z2 + c, where c is a complex constant with real and imaginary parts). The idea behind this formula is that one takes the x and y coordinates of a point z, and plug them into z in the form of x + i*y, where i is the square root of -1, square this number, and then add c, a constant. Then plug the resulting pair of real and imaginary numbers back into z, run the operation again, and keep doing that until the result is greater than some number.
