When the bolted doors swung open

As I wrote yesterday, the two books by Nicosia-based author and researcher Stefanos Evangelidis, a lawyer and member of the Society of Greek Writers in Athens, take female criminality in colonial Cyprus as their subject. But Evangelidis is adamant about one thing above all: in those years, “the woman in Cyprus was first and foremost the victim, not the perpetrator.”

As he puts it, the books “explain to the reader what drove certain women to take another human being’s life. Beyond the interest...