The Roman Mysteries: The Secrets of Vesuvius

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.