"Bull's Labyrinth"

Oregon writer Eric Witchey (ericwitchey.com), a presenter at the Butte College WordSpring writing conference, has a penchant for the offbeat. In "Bull's Labyrinth" ($17.95 in paperback from IFD Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle), he has fashioned a modern day romantic suspense fantasy out of the quest for missing glyphs of the ancient Minoan script called Linear-A. He pulls it off with aplomb, interweaving the story of the brilliant and stunningly beautiful Dr. Nikkis Aristos, 25 years old, with an ancient curse 3500 years old.

The Minoan civilization developed on the island of Crete; there, Nikkis is invited by a detective named Andros to aid in the search for artifact forgers. Andros is "the unfortunate son of Turkish and German parents" and is held in contempt by the locals because, he says, "they believe my ancestors murdered their ancestors. Which, to be candid, is true."

Andros lusts for Nikkis, who constantly fends off his demeaning advances. He takes her to the ruins of Knossos, where King Minos, called the "Bull Among Men," reigned more than three millennia ago. The Master Carver who built his palace is named Daedalus. Nikkis knows the name; Daedalus was "the father of crafts and tools. He built the bull that let the queen of the Minoans be mounted by the white bull, the gift of Poseidon, and hence gave birth to the Minotaur."

Alternating chapters return to Daedalus and the "real story," of how he and his son Ikarus tried to escape the island kingdom by flying away, and how Daedalus, returning when his son plummets to his death after flying too close to the sun, eventually marries a mysterious woman, a goat tender named--Nikkis. The King, jealous of Daedalus' craft, curses him to fall in love with Nikkis and then lose her in life after life; but the Queen, craving the erotic dimension of existence, makes it possible for the curse to be broken, for love to be consummated.

The worlds of archaic Daedalus and present-day Nikkis are drawn with compelling detail, and the action pulls the reader along as, Witchey notes, "the battle between ancient male and female energies" plays out on the page to its breathless conclusion.