Malice Archaeological

by Sarah Wisseman

Cathy loves everything Italian, but working on an archaeological dig in Tuscany, Italy, turns out to be more stressful than she’d imagined. Close quarters and professional jealousies cause friction among her fellow students, and then a harmless prank turns dangerous when forged ceramics appear in one of the trenches.


Author Sarah Wisseman grew up in Massachusetts and Illinois and spent her junior year in college studying archaeology in Israel. This experience changed her life and persuaded her to earn a doctorate in Classical and Near Eastern archaeology. Now a retired archaeologist at the University of Illinois, Sarah enjoys writing art historical and archaeological mysteries. Her Flora Garibaldi mysteries, Burnt Siena (2015) and Catacomb (2016) are set in Italy. The settings of her four Lisa Donahue archaeological mysteries alternate between Boston and the Middle East. A stand-alone historical novel, The Bootlegger’s Nephew (2012) is set in Prohibition-era Illinois.


"Her characters come alive and you can almost taste the coffee" Dr. Allan Campbell

ebook

First published January 18, 2012

About the author

Sarah Wisseman (a.k.a. Sally Underhill) grew up in Evanston, Illinois and Weston Massachusetts. She remembers being surrounded by books all her life, especially moldy old Penguin paperbacks (Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey) that were fought over by her parents. Her mother was a weaver and avid reader, and her father, Thomas Underhill, was a lawyer who wrote mysteries and crossword puzzles. Her son, Nick, has adopted the pen name of his deceased grandfather ("Tom Underhill") and writes historical fantasy in northern Michigan.

Sarah hadn’t a clue that she wanted to be an archaeologist until she traveled to Israel right after her freshman year in college. There she ate felafel, fell in love with Jerusalem, camped illegally on Masada, and spent a month at the excavation of biblical Beersheba. Once hooked by archaeology, she returned for her Junior Year Abroad at Tel Aviv University, an experience that eventually inspired Book 1, The Dead Sea Codex. Books 2 and 3, Bound for Eternity and The Fall of Augustus, were inspired by Sarah's job as a curator in a dusty attic museum. Book 4, The House of the Sphinx, was the result of a trip to Egypt in 2005.