Sophie Chase, a classics and mythology teacher at a Texas university, is involved in a terrible act of violence when two members of her department are shot dead in front of her. The perpetrator is a deranged philosophy student driven mad by jealousy when he was rejected by the beautiful Agnes Hancock, one of Sophie’s students, who was also present at the shooting as was Sophie’s colleague and one-time lover, Professor Elgin Lawrence.
Recovering from this traumatic event, Sophie is asked by Elgin to accompany him to a villa (the Night Villa of the title) in Herculaneum, a Roman town near present-day Naples which was overwhelmed by the same volcanic eruption which overwhelmed Pompeii in A.D. 79. The purpose of the trip is to decipher a number of ancient papyrus scrolls which survived the eruption. Sophie is reluctant but when Elgin shows her one with a reference to Sophie’s own research into the Roman slave girl Petronia Iusta she is tempted. Furthermore, Agnes, to whom Sophie feels protective, is going. And she fears that her ex-husband, Ely, whom she lost to a dangerous cult devoted to the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras five years previously, is now trying to contact her. So she decides to go to Italy. But then she finds that danger and conspiracy and the consequences of the shooting have followed her.
The story is told at two levels: Sophie’s own, and that of the Roman slave girl Iusta. Carol Goodman has taught Latin and her deep knowledge of Graeco-Latin mythology illuminates this book. The characters are well-drawn and believable; interestingly, the slave girl Iusta really did exist.
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Radmila May
Also by Carol Goodman: The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water, The Drowning Tree, The Ghost Orchid, The Sonnet Lover