Coast Salish street cop Silas Seaweed is back in another West Coast noir mystery.

Giant Thunderbirds are threatening the skies above British Columbia. A man is found dead in an abandoned church. Canada’s Governor General is dying and an aboriginal shaman is called upon to perform last rites. Add a violent gang boss, Chinese assassins, dangerous women and Coast Salish mythology and it all adds up to another suspenseful page turner.

I doubt very much if Ritsos believed even for an instant that the archaic struggle of man against the forces that subdue him would end in freedom from illusory attachments and entanglements. On the contrary, what he skillfully presents in his work are mediating symbols, incarnating out of the depths of his awareness–diligently crafting a literary isthmus to the heart of his personal truth. Ritsos's life, wrought with imposed detentions, health limitations, and personal tragedies, bears witness to this attitude that paradoxically, is best understood as something yet to be experienced... a future homecoming of sorts. His is the poetry of waiting, and yearning, and finally projecting the heroic Eros of the Greek psyche: the dominant imperative of an unfettered existence at the zero point of man's subjectivity.

Ilya Tourtidis