Judith Starkston has spent too much time exploring the remains of the ancient worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Their myths and clashes inspire her fiction and open gates to magical realms. She has degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell. She loves myths and telling stories, and her novels imbue fantasy with the richness of ancient worlds. The first book in her Trojan Threads Series, Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M.M. Bennett’s Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana, the first in her historical fantasy Tesha series, won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith is represented by Richard Curtis.
C.S. Harris’s mystery Where Shadows Dance set in London in 1812 will keep you guessing until the very end. When a surgeon buys a body for his medical students to dissect, he hardly expects to step into the middle of a murder case. But as Sebastian St. Cyr tries to solve the case, the dead bodies keep appearing and even his fiancée is a suspect.
Jewell Parker Rhodes’s latest mystery in her Marie Laveau series, Hurricane, is a spell-binding mystery infused with an inspiring take on what womanhood can be in all its aspects. Hurricane Katrina may be the least of Marie’s problems as she faces a miasma of confusing ancient spirits, a murdered family, powerful oil companies, and a curiously ill town.
A wide-ranging interview with author Bruce Macbain about his mystery Roman Games and the historical background of it–from the exotic cult of Isis to parallels between Roman sensibilities and contemporary American life.
A young Edna Ferber, later novelist of Giant, Show Boat, and So Big and member of the Algonquin Round Table, teams up with Houdini to solve the mystery when a school friend disappears and then turns up murdered. Ed Ifkovic vividly portrays small town American life at the turn of the century.
Here are two travel memories. One, a comical, pastoral memory starring an ancient spring, an irate shepherd and two college girls. The second an inspirational memory from a first visit to the Acropolis in Athens. But perhaps these can’t compete with Francis Rocca’s lyrical article describing the joys of visiting the Roman Forum, a place “Where the Ancient Past is Palpably Present”.
Archaeologists have found an 8,000 year old skeleton in Istanbul, the oldest human remains yet found in Turkey. Incredibly, the wooden cover of the coffin was found intact, preserved by black clay below current sea level.
Jacqueline Winspear fans won’t need any prodding to read her latest Maisie Dobbs mystery, A Lesson in Secrets. The rest of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Maisie’s character makes for uncommonly good reading as she takes a new direction professionally, working undercover for the Secret Service in the midst of the conflicting political currents of 1932.
Bruce Macbain’s Roman Games launches an excellent new Roman mystery series. If you are a fan of Steven Saylor, Lindsey Davis, or Roman history in general, you’ll want to pick it up. His detective, Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Younger), a decent, straight-laced senator, teams up with Martial, a poet of racy and scurrilous verses, to untangle a delightfully twisted murder case.
Bless the Bride, the latest in Rhys Bowen’s Molly Murphy series, sends Molly to New York’s Chinatown in 1903 to sift through layers of crime and a major moral dilemma before she’ll get a chance at the layers of her own wedding cake–or will she?
Archaeology Magazine has a fascinating online “interactive dig” based on the Zominthos dig on the Greek island of Crete where there have been some pretty amazing Minoan and Mycenaean Bronze Age finds. Enjoy experiencing the ancient world of Crete almost first hand.
