In AD 79 the emperor Vespasian was dying and some prophetess was announcing the end of the world. Meanwhile Desiderata had to deal with a fresh criminal plot from her old enemy Numa. You'd think that things couldn't get any worse, but that was counting without Mount Vesuvius literally blowing its top above Pompeii. What on earth were our blind 'seeker of justice', her deaf husband Simplex, and uncle Balbus doing there that summer, a true case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? It's a complicated story, but as it happened, they had not one, but three equally compelling reasons to visit Campania and pursue their investigations in this small, provincial, but nevertheless fashionable town. Little did they know what surprises awaited them. Not only did they have to face their arch-enemy in a blood-curdling showdown, but they had to confront the horrors of a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions. Both events would take them to the brink of their instincts for survival, and ultimately turn some of their assumptions upside down.

Nick Aaron is Dutch, but he was born in South Africa (1956), where he attended a British-style boarding school, in Pietersburg, Transvaal. Later he lived in Lausanne (Switzerland), in Rotterdam, Luxembourg and Belgium. He worked for the European Parliament as a printer and proofreader. Currently he's retired and lives in Malines.

Recently, after writing in Dutch and French for many years, the author went back to the language of his mid-century South African childhood. A potential global readership was the incentive; the trigger was the character of Daisy Hayes, who asserted herself in his mind wholly formed.