Risk analyst James Axton lives in Athens and works across Greece and the Middle East, part of a community of American ex-pats that includes his estranged wife and child. Their peripatetic existence is interrupted when a horrific, unexplained murder on the island of Kouros becomes the catalyst for Axton becoming embroiled in a dizzying conspiracy of ritualistic violence, cultism, and ancient languages. Evocative, complex and beguiling, The Names is another major work from one of the 20th century's great prose stylists.