Adventure, passion, betrayal, secrets, blood and violence, this is a hell of a read. ‘Spartacus for Girls’ about a Jewish slave girl and a Roman Gladiator, it is terrific stuff. I haven’t been this excited about a first novel since The Russian Concubine. You need to steal time to read it for you really cannot put it down, and nor should you.
Passion. Treachery. Murder...A heart-stopping epic about a Jewish slave girl and Rome's greatest gladiator, who become involved in a plot to assassinate an emperor Orphaned by Rome's savage legions, Thea, a slave girl from Judaea, has learned what it takes to survive. She knows only violence until a chance meeting with gladiator Arius offers a shred of tenderness. But their bond is severed when Thea is sold again, condemned to rot in squalor. Years later, a singer known as Athena betrays no hint of her troubled past. Catching the eye of the Emperor himself, she is swept into a world of decadence and depravity. But although Domitian fears betrayal from every side, he is unaware that the greatest threat lies next to him -- a slave girl who has come to be called the Mistress of Rome...
Kate Quinn is a native of southern California. She attended Boston University, where she earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Classical Voice whilst at the same time writing her first novel, MISTRESS OF ROME, in the university’s basement computer lab. Now twenty-seven, Kate lives in San Diego with her husband.