A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

It's the number sequence that's clued me in: 3-4-5, the simplest representation of the Pythagorean theorem. Ely was obsessed with it. He heard it in the cawing of the grackles outside our Hyde Park bungalow and claimed the traffic lights on Guadalupe were timed to it. from page 12, The Night Villa The Night Villa is Carol Goodman's latest novel. This one, like its predecessor, The Sonnet Lover , begins in the U.S. before moving the action to Italy. Dr. Sophie Chase, a classics professor at the University of Texas, is working on a book about a first century Roman slave woman named Iusta who essentially took her masters to court to sue for her freedom. Iusta's fate--both the outcome of her court case and her life--is vague as she disappears from the historical record when her village, Herculaneum, is buried by fallout from the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The eruption buried the entire town and many of its inhabitants, preserving them in volcanic ash ...