Review Rating
With the October 2004 review, we began rating the books on the basis of one to four trowels;
one trowel= don’t bother, to four trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
Golden Oldies - reviewing previously unreviewed books by previously reviewed “greatest hits” authors!
As we celebrate twenty-five years of the MVAC reviews of archaeological fiction, I thought it would be fun to re-visit six of the authors whose works have been reviewed in the past. Three of these authors have sadly passed away since I first reviewed them (Margot Arnold, Lynn Hamilton, and Elizabeth Peters); two have “retired” their archaeologist protagonists, Gideon Oliver (Aaron Elkins), and Emma Fielding (Dana Cameron); and one, (Kate Ellis) continues to put DI Wesley Peterson and his friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, in harm’s way as solve contemporary crimes that have their roots in the distant past. While these authors have been reviewed previously, these books have not.
Caesarion by Jack O’Brien
Reviewed on: September 1, 2026
Coursaire, LLC: Undisclosed address
2026 (PB)
Within a very few years of the 30 BC death of Pharaoh Cleopatra VII, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, Roman-eras writers Strabo and Plutarch reported that she had committed suicide to join her husband Marc Antony after his suicide following his defeat at the hands of his rival Octavian—known to later history as Caesar Augustus—at the Battle of Actium. To clear the way for his ascent to supremacy in the Roman Empire, Octavian had his one potential rival—Caesarion, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, killed in Egypt.
But what if Strabo and Plutarch—and subsequent historians of the Roman Empire—had it wrong? What if Caesarion did not die at the hands of Octavian but lived into a ripe old age and recorded the real history of that tumultuous era? That is the story told by author Jack O’Brien in his re-imagining of the life and times of the heir to Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.
More than two thousand years separates the odyssey of Caesarion, enmeshed in the deadly coils of Roman justice under Octavian and the contemporary academic research interests of Carlo DeLuca, a doctoral student at the University of Naples Federico II, and the journalistic interests of Fia Quinn, a feature writer for Archaeology Today magazine. Fia and Carlo had a history—falling in love as students at Tufts University in Boston and then drifting apart as she began writing for the archaeology periodical headquartered on the West Coast and he, developing software for Google in Pittsburgh.
It was in this capacity that Carlo developed an extraordinary AI app he christened “Calamari,” which he was to brilliantly utilize when he entered the doctoral program in Archaeology at Federico II. The Calamari software enabled him to read seventeen scorched and extremely fragile scrolls unearthed in a buried mausoleum found in Herculaneum, the ruined city resting in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. The story that unfolds from the charred scrolls and frescoes preserved on the walls of the mausoleum may well re-write history. Carlo urges his former lover, Fia Quinn, to fly into nearby Capodichino Airport in Naples, to join him on the dig, and to prepare herself to write an article that will stun the international archaeology community.
The scrolls begin the tale—a memoire written in his own hand--told by an aged Caesarion, son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra! He tells of the perfidious machinations of Octavian that result in the murders of Cleopatra and Marc Antony and open the way for Octavian—the future Caesar Augustus-- to become sole ruler of what was now to be the Roman Empire.
But Octavian’s plot requires a scapegoat to answer for the murder of Cleopatra, and that scapegoat will be Caesarion, who has assumed the guise of Stratos, a eunuch in the royal entourage of the Pharaoh. He flees Egypt and seeks justice under the legal system of Athens. But he is pursued by Octavian’s military forces who are more than willing for the fugitive to be tried under Athenian law—as long as he is found guilty and executed!
The trials and tribulations of Caesarion are described in rich detail—not only from the memoirs that are unfolding for Carlo and Fia, but also in chapters that take the reader back to the Classical world of Rome and Athens, c. 29 BC, and the machinations of the Athenian legal establishment as they learn the real identity of their prisoner and come to the realization that they must walk the fine line between what is morally correct and the destructive power of the Roman military if it does not get its way.
In much the same way, Carlo and Fia find themselves facing forces inimical to their search for an accurate rendering of a critical moment in world history. Carlo’s academic future is very much put in question when the veracity of his research is doubted by his own less than scrupulous academic advisor, and criminal entities seem to have an unhealthy interest in the excavations that yielded Caesarion’s scrolls, which, they believe may hold clues to a cache of rubies linked to Alexander the Great’s military thrust into India.
In sum, Caesarion is a most imaginative retelling of history, with lots of contemporary action and adventure added for the reader’s pleasure and easily deserves four trowels from this reviewer.
