Whereas Yellow Dancer took Laura West to the Caribbean, Yilan makes her go East, to the Greek Aegean, where both she and her indomitable sister Solitaire follow the tracks of Süleyman the Silent who kidnaped Laura´s adopted son Ignace. It´s a desperate race against time and a hallucinating dance around a much-coveted legendary icon of the Virgin Mary that proudly carries the scars of revolutionary turmoil both in fledgeling modern Greece and a chaotic Soviet Union in the making. As always, Laura, a staunch agnostic herself, is firmly wedged between all fronts, Orthodox and otherwise. Undaunted, the unlikely twin sisters accept the challenge of a showdown in a giant long-abandoned and half decrepit wooden orphanage. Situated on the largest of the Princes´ Islands in the Marmara Sea just beyond the pale of Istanbul, the solitary orphanage is said to be resounding with the laughter and cries of kids occasionally, on calm and quiet nights.

Born 1945 in Altensteig, Northern Black Forest region, Paul Werner grew up in Wuppertal. A Naval ensign set for a professional military career, he left the German Armed Forces in reaction to the 1967 assassination of Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg, whose murder had, in the opinion of quite a few Germans, been brushed under the carpet by both politics and the judiciary. Having studied English and Russian philology in Wuerzburg and Bonn and obtained his degree in 1972, Paul Werner did not take up grammar-school teaching, however, but seized the opportunity of becoming a conference interpreter with the EU-Commission in Brussels, instead. Studying law at the Open University in parallel to his working from eight "passive" languages into German and English, he did stints of varying duration in European capitals and cultures such as London, Copenhagen, Athens, Moscow, and Istanbul. Married to a Dane, he visited Scandinavia and not least Norway on a regular basis both by boat, car, and aeroplane. Having dabbled in the concoction of articles and essays both in German and English ever since his military and student days, Paul Werner, meanwhile a pensioner, has for more than a decade devoted himself almost exclusively to the writing of essays on "sea lore" and adventure novels with a criminal leaning. A divorced dad of three adult daughters, Paul Werner today lives in Heidelberg, a pretty far cry from the sea.