Description
In A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved, a London nurse narrates the story of a drifter she latches onto in a public hospital. Henri is in permanent recovery, not only from his heroin addiction, but from the 1960s, a decade that invited the unwary to the biggest party in history, then discarded them. She is curious about his past life on the Côte d'Azur with a French countess, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in their exile. Henri dismisses that story; it's an old one. Instead, he tells her about a couple he knew in Nice, the man an Armenian with the convenient name Armen, and his wife, Luciana, originally from Bessarabia, a forgotten battleground of Europe, subsumed into the bigger countries around it. They are gamblers who continually made and lost small fortunes. They are also genocide survivors a word Henri understands for the first time when he hears them utter it Armen escaping the Smyrna conflagration in 1922, and Luciana surviving the totalitarian powers that scourged Europ
