The Moon Maiden - Tapa blanda

When Thasos and his family are thrown out of their homeland and left to drift in the open sea, they are rescued by the Keftiu, a people with an unpleasant reputation for human sacrifice. However, to the family's surprise, their rescuers treat them kindly and take them as honoured guests to the peaceful, distant island of Kaftor, where they find a sophisticated and very different civilisation, ruled by women. Thasos and his mother happily settle into the Palace of Cnossos, but his two warrior brothers can't come to terms with life in a matriarchy; a society where war is unheard of and there seems to be no such thing as crime or punishment. They soon find out that the usually placid Keftiu can deal very effectively with anyone who causes trouble.As Thasos grows up, he becomes aware that there is a very dark and troubling underside to this world. Finally his life is placed in terrible danger when he falls under the spell of two of the island's most powerful women: Britomartis, the Goddess of the Hunt and Pasiphae, the Moon Maiden of Cnossos. Sucked into the island's dark, labyrinthine underworld, with no prospect of escape, a terrified Thasos is forced to make a very dangerous choice.The Moon Maiden brings the fascinating, long vanished society of Minoan Crete back to glorious life in a fast-moving tale of love, ambition and betrayal.

Vince and Sandra Peddle were born (respectively) in High Wycombe and Leicester. Both keen travellers, they have - between them - lived in such far-flung places as the USA, South Africa, Germany, Greece and Turkey - as well as Portsmouth, Manchester, Wellingborough and Watford (where for some years they owned and ran a large second-hand bookshop in the high street). In 2002 they moved to the island of Jersey. They first met when living on another island, Crete, and they have long been fascinated by things Cretan. "We always find ourselves coming back to Crete in the end," says Vince Peddle. "Sixteen years after we stopped living there, it is still our home. The Moon Maiden (and, indeed, the whole Cnossos trilogy) is an attempt not so much to revive a vanished ancient world as to convey to the reader our sense of a timeless, mystical essence about Crete that is indefinably special - which perhaps explains why, in Minoan times, the island was sacred."