Firewalker
An American journalist and his young ex-pat Bulgarian wife arrive in Bulgaria to spend a few weeks with the parents-in-law. As John struggles to come to grips with the least known land in Europe, a series of gruesome murders of historians, all perpetrated at ancient rock shrines, appear on the national news. While his wife’s enthusiasm for get-togethers with friends and family fades and she realises that her home country has changed beyond recognition, the bored John employs Maya, an archaeologist-cum-journalist, to take him around the murder scenes and explain the background. Fuelled by a growing attraction, they travel across an enchanted and cursed country scarred not only by the stone shrines and rituals of an ancient civilisation, but also by the traumatic fall-out at the end of the Communist regime and its enduring legacy of secrets and lies.
Soon the two journalists become entangled in a recklessly dangerous investigation of the sadistic assassinations where long-forgotten Thracian blood rituals, small and big time treasure hunters, cosmology, a sinister secret sect of young self-styled ‘Thracians’, and Mircea Eliade’s theories of the cyclical nature of time play out against the backdrop of a post-totalitarian society. Nothing is what it seems. John and Maya begin to discover that the only thing more dangerous than a serial killer set loose is the Bulgarian Mafia state of the 2010s.
As the ring of murders tightens around John and Maya and they become obsessed with the uncovering of ancient rituals, he realises that he is torn between staying with Maya and returning to the US with his unhappy and dependent wife. Meanwhile, the free-spirited but vulnerable Maya must stay behind and face the consequences of their actions.
This is an edgy, richly atmospheric, brilliantly conceived and elegantly written literary thriller, which masterfully weaves archaeology, philosophy, organised crime, the moral chaos of post-Communist Europe, and doomed love.
Dimana Trunkova
Dimana Trankova (b. 1980) is an archaeologist by education and a journalist by vocation. She has authored over a thousand articles on travel, politics, history and archaeology in her native Bulgaria. She is the co-author of several bestselling non-fiction books such as “East of Constantinople/Travels in Unknown Turkey” (2008), “A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria” (2011), “A Guide to Ottoman Bulgaria” (2011, 2012), “The Turks of Bulgaria” (2012) and “Hidden Treasures of Bulgaria, Vol. 2” (2014). She has been the executive editor of “Highflights,” Bulgaria’s English-Bulgarian travel magazines, and of “Go Greece!,” Bulgaria’s magazine about Greece. “The Smile of the Dog" (Colibri, 2014) is her first novel.
