The Obsidian Bull - A Novel of Occupied Crete, 1941. The Secrets of Crete, #7

Anogia, July 1941. The morning smells of thyme and hot stone - and nothing announces that this day will be different. Then the Germans come up the mountain. In the wake of the airborne invasion of Crete, an occupation officer with an archaeologist's eyes arrives in the mountain villages beneath Mount Ida. Doctor Brehmer is not hunting partisans. He is hunting something older: a Minoan artifact of black volcanic glass - the obsidian bull - a treasure the Reich wants and the island has kept hidden for three thousand years.
Between him and the artifact stand a village priest who has buried more than his parishioners, a young woman named Melina who knows the mountain paths better than any map, and a community with a long memory of what conquerors cost. In Crete, the past is never merely the past - and some things are not taken from the island. They are only borrowed, and always repaid. A novel of resistance and archaeology set in the first year of the German occupation of Crete, where the war over an ancient bull becomes a war over who owns memory itself.
Part of The Secrets of Crete, a series of standalone novels spanning four thousand years of Cretan history. Each book can be read independently.