The writer Sophia Nikolaidou confronts the disillusionment in The Scapegoat, a neatly kaleidoscopic stirring of a novel, her first to be translated into English. Nikolaidou, in Karen Emmerich’s swift translation, connects the present anxiety to the 1948 murder of the American journalist George Polk (the namesake of the prestigious Polk Awards), who had been investigating Greece’s corrupt right-wing government during the nation’s Civil War.