In 1992 Daisy Hayes had inherited Bottomleigh House and was struggling to keep it afloat financially. Then she got a letter from an archaeologist, asking her to help make sense of a mysterious message that had just been dug up in Rome. Time to hook up again with Morag, her deaf friend from the 'project' in 1964, and to go back to the Eternal City.In AD 64, after Feli's death, Desiderata had scores to settle and a 'twin sister' to bury. Her new friends the Christians gave her sanctuary, but her relationship with them was a bit strained. Soon the 'Community' and their blind protégée had to part company. Eventually, assisted by her uncle Balbus, ex-centurion of the X Fretensis legion, she found a path out of her troubles, and helped him search for a stolen treasure.So, 1928 years later, Daisy went looking for a gold cache from antiquity, hoping to solve a new mystery, and even more to reconnect with Desi, her soulmate from ancient Rome. 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. Daisy Hayes was born in London in 1922. Her father was a bank manager, hoping for a son, but he had to settle for a blind daughter.Now what do you do when your child is blind since birth and you have the means to do all that is necessary to help her? You hire a private tutor to stimulate her verbal abilities in the first years of her life, because you realize how vital language will become for her. Then you send her to an exclusive school where everything is done to develop the minds and resourcefulness of blind girls. There they teach them all these fancy techniques of spatial orientation and mind mapping. And before you know it, your darling daughter has become a smart female detective who just seems to draw murder mysteries like a magnet…
