Books by Sara Winokur
Ivory Bones:
The Lewis Chessmen Murders
Ancient chess pieces. A centuries-old diary. And a modern killer closing in.
When Icelandic forensic geneticist Brynja Pálsdóttir, haunted by her family’s dark legacy, is drawn into the search for the missing Lewis Chessmen, she becomes a pawn in an assassin’s deadly game.
A centuries-old diary, written by a woman abducted during the brutal Barbary pirate raid on Iceland in 1627, lands on her desk. Brynja soon realizes the woman’s story may hold the key to finding the priceless medieval artifacts.
As Brynja digs deeper, she becomes the target, surrounded by deception and unsure of whom she can trust: the NYPD colleague hiding her own motives, the sculptor whose family lays claim to the chessmen, the lover she has spurned, even her own assistant.
As the past and present collide, betrayal, loss, and survival transcend time and place.
Ivory Bones: The Lewis Chessmen Murders now available for pre-order:
Double Blind:
The Icelandic Manuscript Murders
What is buried in the dark takes its time to haunt and torture —until it comes to the light. Death has come to kill, but first it wants to play.
Geneticist Brynja Pálsdóttir mines the country’s controversial DNA database to crack the country’s toughest cases, none so puzzling as the disappearance of her young brother two decades earlier. Still wracked with guilt for losing sight of him that day, Brynja is stunned when a poem arrives with riddles as to his whereabouts. Along with her fiancé Ari Ketilsson, the prime minister, and her quirky childhood friend Stína, she deciphers the clues while trying in vain to suppress the visual auras that threaten her career as a forensic scientist. Not to mention her relationship with Ari.
Soon, her search is thwarted by a series of threats — warnings drawn from a medieval manuscript of Icelandic sagas — delivered to those in her inner circle. One by one, the recipients fall ill and die: the manuscript guard, the prime minister’s secretary, the local pastor. Each warning is a poem. And the last is meant for her. She alone must summon the strength to navigate the twisted labyrinth of the poet’s mind and confront the dark secret buried in her family’s past.
Double Blind: The Icelandic Manuscript Murders now available for pre-order: