With her new friends and fellow detectives, Flavia solves a second mystery against the background of the eruption of Vesuvius.
It's the summer of AD 79, and Flavia Gemina the sea captain's daughter and her friends Jonathan the Jewish boy, Nubia the African slave-girl and Lupus the homeless beggar-boy set sail for the Bay of Naples, to stay with Flavia's uncle near Pompeii. They are soon consumed by a quest to solve a riddle that may lead to treasure. But then tragedy strikes: Mount Vesuvius erupts and the children are fleeing for their lives, in one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded. Not just a mystery - an absolutely thrilling action adventure that makes you feel you were there!
THE SECRETS OF VESUVIUS in the immensely readable Roman Mysteries series by Caroline Lawrence again features a kind of classical famous five: Flavia Gemina and her friends, Jonathan, Nubia and Lupus, plus Scuto the dog, meet the great Pliny while on holiday in Pompeii and end up near Mount Vesuvius on the fateful night it erupted. An enormous amount of information about the ancient world is conveyed under the guise of a jolly good romp - Fiona Lafferty
Caroline Lawrence is American. She lives with her husband by the river in London and is active as a speaker in schools and at book festivals. She took part in the British Museum's POMPEII LIVE event, giving talks that were streamed to schools all over the UK, and she is the winner of the 2009 CLASSICS ASSOCIATION PRIZE for 'a significant contribution to the public understanding of Classics'. In addition to the 17 novels in the ROMAN MYSTERIES sequence, Caroline Lawrence has written five spin-off titles, all of which have contributed to total UK sales in excess of 1 million copies.
Visit Caroline's website at www.carolinelawrence.com and follow her on Twitter @CarolineLawrenc.