Jeff Southard

Year of the Hoopoe Jeff Southard

In Year of the Hoopoe, we return to the lives of two most unlikely crime fighters -



Justin Cataphlates and his wife Sophie. By 1016, Justin is the Treasurer of the



Roman Empire whose capital is Constantinople and which later ages will call



Byzantium, while Sophie is the chief lady-in-waiting to Princess Zoe, the oldest



daughter of one of the two reigning emperors. A series of murders of Varangians,



the emperors' most trusted soldiers from the far north of Europe, combined with a



mysterious illness of one of the emperors put the couple to their greatest test yet!



Can they actually defeat the Norse goddess of death, who appears before each



murder? Is their old foe, the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, behind all of the mayhem?