Anthropology through Fiction

A newlywed couple, both members of an athletic investigative team, bikes, hikes, flies, and bikes again, from Big Sur, California to and along the Silk Road, traveling throughout Central Asia to East Asia on assignment. Even though they're on their honeymoon, their duties are to find the villain they're ordered to round up as the villain hunts them. Romantic intrigue, suspense, and adventure action in a thriller: Stay free, and hike at Big Sur. Yet the honeymooning couple continues on to bike the Silk Road covering much of Central and East Asia on assignment to find the culprit. Curiosity skilled the cat, and action coaxed it back. Resilience filled the cat, when self-confidence sniffed a rat. While Doros - ????? Argos mugged a twisted smile, he day-dreamed of the fierce maroon eyes of his old Greek islands flame, known as "The Cat," a strong-willed mountain biker from Chios with a feline-like expression. Aphi, short for Aphroditi - ★★★★★★?? Adis, appeared to Doros. He knew her as 'the Cat'. And she knew Doros as 'the Dog.' The 'Cat' appeared to Doros in a dream, bikinied, in a haystack with a wisp of broom straw dangling from her blood-red lips. In reality, no one heard Aphi Adis scream. At three in a dog-day, August morning, the 'Cat' (Aphi) clawed the dry earth in California, where the FBI's most-wanted file number sixteen had buried her in the six by seven foot grave, not in her native Chios, but in a rural part of California, near Big Sur, where she was supposed to have a slightly belated honeymoon with her new husband, Doron. She couldn't have been closer to home in the most isolated wooded area near California's Sykes clothing- optional campgrounds, but he wished they were honeymooning back in Chios, the Greek island, as they had planned a week after their recent wedding. Work details kept both of them in California. The last thing Aphi remembered was a large, gloved hand over her mouth and scratchy thorns. Then she awoke, and pounced on her own throbbing headache in pitch blackness, and within seconds began to claw, to kick, to bite at the ceiling of her brittle, ceramic coffin. Wolf E. Schitte, a cartoonist turned arsonist, had stripped the FBI's wired microphone, recorder, and honing device from her waist, burned her tee shirt and jeans, and tossed her kicking into the yawning construction ravine wearing nothing but a string and a whistle.