Charles Gates Escape from Smyrna

Annotation

Escape from Smyrna, a mystery novel set in Turkey and Greece, unveils the intertwining histories of three families, Anglo-American, Turkish, and Greek, bound together by an ancient necklace that incites violence yet has powers of healing and redemption. It is 1982. Four Swiss hippies steal a gold locket from a chapel on a barren Greek island. Soon after, it appears for sale in Istanbuls Covered Bazaar. Oran Crossmoor, an athletic 26-year-old American, buys the locket, recognizing it as part of a lost family heirloom, a necklace of four medieval reliquaries. When he shows it to Leyla Aslanoglu, a rich, witty octogenarian friend of his mother, she claims it as treasure of her family. But neither Oran nor Leyla has any idea that the answer to their conflict over the necklace lies in a dramatic escape from Smyrna decades earlier...