A few years ago I read and loved Kate Quinn’s Mistress of Rome, but it had taken me some time to pick up this prequel. I really enjoyed the central love story in Mistress, so the larger and more scattered cast left me feeling less invested in Daughters. Daughters of Rome takes place during the Year of Four Emperors, around 69 AD. Our main characters are the “four Cornelias”; four young women from a very prominent patrician family. Cornelia Prima is well- and happily married […]
For the glory of Rome!
John Williams was a professor of English literature whose previous novels dealt, In muted emotions, with the lives of very humble men. So it is with a little surprise that one picks up this book, his most critically successful novella, about the life of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, born Gaius Octavius Thurinus. Augustus (Ocatavian), a real historical figure, adopted by Julius Caesar as a young boy, who used the latter’s assassination as a galvanizing force to raise an army of his own and start […]
Abductions, Dionysian Orgies and Mummified Corpses Oh My!
We’re back in Rome, where Detective Nic Costa gets drawn into the case of a missing 16-year-old American girl whose mother insists she was abducted by a mysterious man on a motorcycle in front of a bunch of disinterested Carabinieri. While few at police headquarters take the mother seriously—the girl’s been gone less than a day, after all—Nic suspects that something more is going on. For one thing, the girl is the spitting image of a girl abducted 16 years earlier, whose mummified corpse […]
Like The Da Vinci Code, only better
Another Nic Costa crime thriller set in Rome, which reads less like a movie script and more like a subtler and fully-fleshed version of The Da Vinci Code. Young cop Nic Costa has recently been partnered with burned-out detective Luca Rossi and is sitting outside St. Marks Square trying to figure out how to survive the intense summer heat and humidity when reports of a shooting in the Vatican galvanizes the bored Costa into action. Despite strict instructions to steer clear of Vatican affairs, […]