Mary Stewart’s My Brother Michael is a rich tale of adventure, intrigue, and mystery set in the rugged landscape of Delphi, where ghosts and old gods still roam the hills. Set in the late 1950s—and written in the same period—the story is imbued with the elegance and class of a bygone era.

There is a reason Mary Stewart’s work has endured all of these decades. The combination of her sly wit, understated romance, engaging mysteries, and stunning settings is timeless, and My Brother Michael is one of her best offerings. Camilla Haven is in Greece on holiday, fresh from a broken engagement that has left her consistently underestimating herself, when she becomes embroiled in fellow Englishman Simon Lester’s search for the truth regarding his brother’s murder fourteen years prior.

The tragic history of Greece in the Second World War and its aftermath is seamlessly worked into the fabric of the tale. References to art, history, and classical Greek literature are peppered throughout. Some may find the page time Mary Stewart devotes to depicting the locale slows the action of the story, but to my mind, setting is as much a character in her books as the cast. The author’s vivid descriptions and lyrical attention to detail is transportive, and it was as if I were climbing Parnassus along with the characters. Greece has a lyrical siren’s call in Mary Stewart’s work, and “the secret is that it belongs to all of us—to us of the West. We’ve learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It’s given us almost everything that our world has that is worth while. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It’s our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country—and Greece.”

This is a story as cultured as it is exciting, as intelligent as it is tense, as eloquent as it is suspenseful. With a murder mystery that harkens back to Greek tragedies, a heroine of quiet strength and tenacity, a hero who personifies the old adage of “still waters run deep,” and a setting that leaps from the page, My Brother Michael is a classic romantic thriller.

Highly recommended for fans of suspense novels written in a literary style with a healthy dose of adventure and a subtle romance.