The Names

James Axton, an American living in Athens, Greece, works as a risk analyst for the Northeast Group, a subsidiary that sells political risk insurance to multinational corporations. He is separated from his Canadian wife, Kathryn, and their nine-year-old son, Tap, who live on Kouros, a small island in the Cyclades. James travels constantly through the Middle East and South Asia, assessing political instability for corporate clients. Since arriving in Athens, he has avoided climbing to the Acropolis, put off by its weight of cultural expectation.

On Kouros, Kathryn volunteers at an archaeological excavation directed by Owen Brademas, a 60-year-old American epigraphist who studies ancient inscriptions. Tap is writing a novel drawn from stories Owen has told him about growing up on the prairie. James and Kathryn maintain a strained but affectionate connection, their conversations often mediated by Owen during long evening talks. James recounts the dissolution of their marriage through a list of 27 grievances he attributed to Kathryn, ranging from his complacency and emotional withholding to a single word: "American."

Owen tells James about encountering a group of people living in a cave on the island, filthy and dressed in loose-fitting clothes. When he described his work studying inscriptions, including a clay tablet at Ras Shamrah containing the entire Canaanite alphabet, the group grew intensely excited. Their interest lay not in history but in the alphabet itself: letters as written symbols fixed in sequence. Shortly after, an old man is found bludgeoned to death in a village called Mikro Kamini. Owen's assistant field director, Anand Dass, reveals that a similar murder occurred on another island a year earlier, a young girl with a physical disability killed with a hammer. Anand also tells James that Owen visited the cave-dwellers far more often than he admitted.

James's social world in Athens revolves around a circle of expatriate businesspeople: Charles and Ann Maitland, a long-married British couple; David Keller, a banker at the Mainland Bank, and his new young wife, Lindsay; and Andreas Eliades, a Greek businessman who delivers pointed criticisms of American ignorance about the countries where Americans operate.

Frank Volterra, a driven, mercurial filmmaker and old friend of James and Kathryn, visits the island and spends two nights questioning Owen about the cult. Owen reveals he has received word of another murder at the edge of the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, an old woman near death killed with a hammer. He speculates that the killings follow some internal logic, dispatching victims who are already near death or who have disabilities, as if the acts exist outside ordinary social order.

James and Kathryn argue about Tap's future. Kathryn takes a job at a museum in Victoria, British Columbia, arranged through Owen's contacts, and departs with Tap.

In Amman, Jordan, James meets Volterra, who has been searching the desert for the cult with his companion, Del Nearing. Frank has learned to seek out a guide named Vosdanik in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. James and Frank travel there. Vosdanik tells them about a cult murder in a village called Malula near Damascus, where the victim's initials were carved into the weapon. The village is notable because its inhabitants still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Vosdanik discusses ancient beliefs about the destructive and creative power of alphabets.

Sitting alone in the Roman theater in Amman, James has an epiphany: The cult kills victims whose initials match the initials of the place where the murder occurs. The discovery unsettles him further when he notices that the hill where his hotel sits, Jebel Amman, shares initials with his own name.

Back in Athens, Owen confirms the pattern but cautions against searching for deeper meaning. He argues that the killings mock the human need to structure and classify, making the system used to contend with death become death itself.

James takes Tap on a Christmas road trip through the Peloponnese. In the remote Mani region, known for its tower houses, James spots the Greek words "Ta Onómata" (The Names) painted on a boulder. He turns the car around, sensing a connection to the cult. He also suspects he passed cult members in a local café without recognizing them.

Returning to the Mani alone, James finds the words tarred over and meets Andahl, a cult member sitting by a fire in a ruined basement. Andahl confirms the pattern and delivers a graphic account of a previous murder: a woman they tracked for weeks, then beat to death with hammers. He wants an external record of the cult, either a film or a book, because "in one sense we barely exist" (210). In the adjacent hamlet, James finds Volterra trying to arrange a meeting with the remaining cult members. Frank envisions a stripped-down film of stark landscape, mysterious faces, and multiple languages. James tells Frank the group will not cooperate, and he proves right: The meeting never materializes.

Months later, James travels to Lahore, Pakistan, and finds Owen living in a spare room in the old city. Owen recounts walking into the Thar Desert and finding the cult reduced to five people in mud-and-dung storage bins outside a 15th-century town called Hawa Mandir. The group's leader, Avtar Singh, is mercurial and volatile. A German cult member named Emmerich tracks their next victim, an old wanderer named Hamir Mazmudar whose initials match the town's name. Owen speaks daily to Bern, a woman in the group who has stopped eating, trying to sustain her with human language. On the night of the killing, Owen seals himself inside one of the bins and refuses to watch, retreating into childhood memory: his parents' Pentecostal church on the prairie, the congregation speaking in tongues, a gift he himself could never achieve. In the morning, the old man's body is found with two blood-covered stones nearby.

Back in Athens, Charles Maitland reveals that a confidential newsletter has exposed the Northeast Group's connection to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). James realizes he was an unwitting dupe: His boss, George Rowser, had been passing the firm's data to American intelligence without James's knowledge. He telexes his resignation, reflecting that his complicity validates every criticism Kathryn ever made.

Ann Maitland confesses that her lover Andreas kept asking probing questions about James's job and background, suggesting ulterior motives. Andreas then vanishes without explanation.

David Keller is shot by two gunmen while running on Lycabettus Hill. James, running nearby, encounters the fleeing gunman, who looks at him but does not fire. A group calling itself the Autonomous People's Initiative claims responsibility. James is tormented by whether the gunmen targeted David, the banker who approved loans to Turkey, or himself, the analyst with exposed CIA ties. He gives investigators every name he knows, deliberately omitting Ann Maitland to protect her.

Preparing to leave Athens, James finally climbs to the Acropolis. He finds the Parthenon far rougher and more damaged than the elegant image he had seen from the street. What emerges from the stone is "a cry for pity" (330). He watches crowds pass through speaking dozens of languages and concludes that language is what people bring to the temple as their offering.

The novel's final chapter presents a passage from Tap's novel, a fictionalized account of Owen's childhood. A boy named Orville Benton stands in a ramshackle prairie church as his parents and the congregation speak in tongues. A charismatic preacher urges him to yield, but the boy cannot produce the spirit-language. Overcome with terror, he runs from the church into a rainstorm and flees across the muddy prairie, growing "smaller and smaller" (339). The chapter is written in Tap's exuberant, misspelling-laden prose, which James finds exhilarating for the way it restores the strangeness and poetry of familiar words.