TRANSYLVANIA TRIOLOGY by Roberta Seret

My three-book, TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY, takes the reader into a kaleidoscope of exotic colors set in Romania, Turkey and Iran, where governmental intrigues are little known and are waiting to be discovered. All three books, Treasure Hunt, Love Odyssey and The Gift of Diamonds, can be read independently or interchanged. The main characters are Marina, Cristina, Anca and Mica, four friends since their teenaged days in Transylvania, who were known as the Four Musketeers, Poets of their Lives. As they narrate their lives, their stories interweave with fact and fiction to reveal political truths that have never been exposed before, especially in a novel.

Treasure Hunt unites Marina and Cristina as they vacation together in Istanbul and unwillingly, get involved in Turkey’s and Iran’s recent Gas-for-Gold scandal, the largest gold laundering scheme in American history. The friends believe that Romania is at the origin when they remember that their Romanian leader, dictator Ceausescu for 24 years, had traveled to Tehran three days before he was executed in December 1989. He went to visit the new Iranian president, Rafsanjani, who had just started a private bank, the Bank of Tehran. Ceausescu had traveled with suitcases filled with bars of gold. Gold that had never been found. Never claimed.

Love Odyssey narrates the story of Anca, a young doctor working in the Transylvanian countryside during a typhus epidemic. She has special medicines and antibiotics, not available in communist Romania. But she is giving them to non-communists and gypsies. The dictatorial regime is not happy. Her doctor husband fears his pregnant wife will be arrested and arranges her escape. Or is it to get rid of her while he becomes Ceausescu’s personal doctor to bring down communism and become the leader of the Revolution? Nineteen years later, Anca returns to Transylvania to save the man who wronged her. But she could never stop loving.

The Gift of Diamonds introduces Mica at seventeen-years-old, when her parents are plotting to bring down Ceausescu as he comes to power. They are arrested and she realizes she will be next. In the middle of the night, she escapes Transylvania on her bicycle. But she is not alone - she has taken her father’s colored diamonds that were hidden in their basement. Her only fear is that she remembers he had told her, that they come from Auschwitz and may be cursed.

            What I’ve enjoyed the most by writing Transylvanian Trilogy, is using a hybrid approach to take the reader on a journey with a story to self-discovery