Elizabeth Peters

At first, Jean Suttman thought she had died and gone to Heaven when she was granted the opportunity to study in Rome. But the body that's lying in the ancient subterranean Temple of Mithra—the murdered corpse of a repulsive and disliked fellow student—isn't her idea of heavenly. Now she is truly frightened, not just because small "accidents" seem to be occurring around her with disturbing regularity. It's the ever-increasing certainty that someone, for some unknown reason, is ruthlessly determined to do her harm. Jean's innocent underground excursion into a sacred pagan place has trapped her in something dark and terrifying, and even the knowledge that practical, perceptive fellow American Jacqueline Kirby is on the case won't ease her fears. Because there's only so far Jean Suttman can run . . . and no escape for her except death.

The Seventh Sinner

Ipek

So light and lovely - a murder mystery set in Rome in the seventies, this book (almost) inspired me to pick up a bunch of other novels set in Rome that I left half-read at one point or another, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to Tom Rachman's The Italian Teacher. As with those, and a bunch of other novels by a bevy of Anglo writers, it is about a group of expat artists and students and the interactions among them against the backdrop of a semi-exotic, perennially a e s t h e t i c Rome. Plus there's a murder here. It's interesting the amount of murder one encounters in these Rome novels. The Marble Faun, even Donna Tartt's The Secret History. 

The murder mystery isn't very intricate, or difficult to figure out (not that I found it easy to figure out, either - it just felt sort of beside the point when the identity of the murderer was revealed) but that's OK. The charm of the narration picks up where the plot falters and the interesting bits about Rome and its ecclesiastical history, catacombs and so on come to the rescue when the charm fails. According to the reviews, fans of the Amelia Peabody series are kind of disappointed with Jacqueline Kirby but I have to say, I don't see why. They're just as equally good, but then of course, the Amelia Peabody series has both the Victoriana and Egyptology thing going for it whereas this is a more freewheeling kind of enterprise. Anyway, this is just the kind of reading to entertain you, and make you feel like you're back on track with your reading, and make you want to read like 5 other novels right away, or fifty.

The Seventh Sinner

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