Pre-Socratic Philosophy Publisher Turns to Genre Fiction with a Big Bang

The words Suspense, Thriller, and Philosophical Fiction don’t go together very often, and when they do the result will likely be intriguing. And so Parmenides Publishing of Las Vegas, and late of Zurich and Athens, has published its first two mysteries in their Parmenides Fiction line. Pythagorean Crimes (paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-930972-27-2)
by Greek author Tefcros Michaelides is being called “a masterfully-told story” and “a thriller of the mind.” Michaelides is a professor of Mathematics at Athens College in Greece, and the tale starts out in fin-de-siècle Paris at an international mathematics conference that is attended by such math heavyweights as Bertrand Russell, Hilbert, Poincaré, and Gödel. The whole mix will add up to murder and mayhem as the story jumps back and forth in time.

The book I want to write about is Black Market Truth: Book One of the Aristotle Quest (paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-930972-31-5) by Sharon Kaye, a professor of philosophy at John Carroll University. Kaye is the author of Philosophy for Teens and Lost and Philosophy, and she brings her pop-infused training to good use here in a crackerjack story that is being called “rip-roaring,” fast-paced,” “daring,” and “very entertaining.” I really dug this book. It draws circles around books like The Da Vinci Code, which it invariably gets compared to, and The Dante Club, and instructs readers while it has them eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next.

The main character is Dana McCarter, a famous academic expert on ancient Greek philosophy and paleography, and in particular, Aristotle. One day Dana, living in New York, is approached in her office by a mysterious stranger who has an ancient parchment manuscript he would like her to decipher. It turns out to be, as the story goes, one of the lost dialogues of Aristotle. This is incendiary stuff that was pilfered from the dark recesses of the Vatican, no less, and several people will lose their heads over the secret recovery, and ultimate cover-up of the existence of these dialogues. The contents of Aristotle’s lost dialogues turn out to be controversial in the extreme. The amazing thing is that while Dana’s character gets to take a peek at each of stolen Aristotle manuscripts that come her way in the course of the tale, she lets the reader actually read the dialogues themselves, and they develop into a story all their own. We learn about Aristotle the man, and Aristotle the great thinker. Or, as Michael Tierno points out, this “brings Aristotle to life in an entertaining and dramatic way.”

There is more than one parallel story being told in Black Market Truth. There are scenes played out in Second Life, a virtual world of avatars in cyberspace that eerily mirror what is going on in the story. The plot thickens, the blood flows, and nothing is what it seems. This is fascinating stuff, and the best part is there are two more books in the series. Parmenides will announce Book Two in the Aristotle Quest for Fall 2009.