Fresh Blood — Byron Ayanoglu

"Gripping; entertaining; insightful. A true literary and gastronomic treat." Paul William Roberts (author of Empire of the Soul) FRESH BLOOD Maria is a seventy-two year old Greek widow who has just been arrested. She has had a difficult life. Born into the Nazi occupation of her Aegean island, she grew up during the Greek Civil War and its aftermath in the impoverished fifties. Married off in her teenaged years to a rich man many years her senior, she suffers the indignities of an abused wife for forty-seven years as Greece struggles with the political chaos of the sixties, the tyranny of the Junta in the seventies, the fake normalcy of the corrupt eighties and nineties, and the exaggerated promises of the European Union in the new century. Finally free of her husband, who dies in 2004, Maria spends eight peaceful years with her books and her friends, until that fateful morning of her reckoning in 2012, at the nadir of the Greek financial crisis. We go back in time and relate her story to uncover the nature of her crime.