From Publishers WeeklyYarbro's romantic, colorful cycle of historical horror novels (Hotel Transylvania, Blood Games) focuses this time on Olivia, the noble Roman lady who became a lover of the vampire Count Sanct' Germain in the time of Nero. Hundreds of years later, in the sixth century, Olivia is forced to flee Rome as war flares. In the more repressive and vigilantly Christian city of Constantinople she is suspect as a foreigner and an unmarried woman of wealth. When her patron, General Belisarius, falls out of favor with Emperor Justinian, she has no protection from the zealous Court Censor. Although the fact that Olivia is a vampire makes little difference until the end, the book has a real, cumulative power as a portrait of an intelligent, cosmopolitan woman caught in a paranoid web of politics and religious persecution. Particularly striking are its connections between the personal and the historical, the most moving of which is the reaction to Justinian's ordering the burning of the Library of Alexandria, with its thousands of irreplacable ancient texts. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalIn A.D. 545, when Rome is sacked, Olivia Clemens, a wealthy Roman citizen, flees to Constantinople. Accustomed to liberal Roman ways, Olivia chafes under the restrictions of Constantinople's narrow society; as a foreigner and a thinking woman she finds herself victim of an Inquisition-like plot. A skillful blend of history and fiction, this novel is a romantic tale of intrigue, given added spice by the fact that its heroine happens to be a 500-year-old vampire. This is the first in a new series from Yarbro , known for her novels featuring the vampire Saint Germain. It is not a horror novel; any horror stems not from vampirism but from human acts in an age of religious persecution. Olivia's vampirism is a very minor subplot in an excellent historical about a strong and sympathetic woman. Highly recommended. A.M.B. Amantia, Population Crisis Comm. Lib., Washington, D.C. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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