Haunting Secrets Between Ancient Rome and War-torn Ukraine - an Editorial Review of "What Remains"

Book Blurb:

What Remains is a haunting dual-timeline mystery that bridges centuries-and secrets-between ancient Rome and the modern world.

Forensic anthropologist Tori Benino has just landed the opportunity of a lifetime: leading a dig at a long-buried Roman village lost to the eruption of Vesuvius. But when she uncovers the remains of a Praetorian guard hidden in an ancient latrine-clearly murdered-Tori realizes she's stumbled onto something far more sinister than a routine excavation. As she digs deeper into the past, her own carefully ordered life begins to fall apart.

Nearly two thousand years earlier, Thalia, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, is desperate to escape an arranged marriage to a brutal and politically powerful senator. Her only hope lies with a Praetorian soldier assigned to guard her-but trusting him could cost her everything.

As past and present collide, What Remains asks: When history is buried, what truths refuse to stay hidden?

Perfect for fans of Kathy Reichs and Kate Quinn, this novel is inspired by true events and delivers a compelling blend of suspense, history, and heart.

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/CkNPg1

Editorial Review:

In What Remains, Erryn Lee invites the reader into that uncertain space where time folds in upon itself, where the centuries whisper across the veil of ash and human longing rises, unchanged, from the depths. She constructs her narrative as one might weave a tapestry—three threads glimmering separately at first, then slowly, almost imperceptibly, entwining. There is ancient Herculaneum, trembling beneath the shadow of Vesuvius; there is modern Italy, sun-washed and restless; and there is Ukraine, stark in its grief, where the earth remembers too much. And in the crossing of these landscapes—ruined, radiant, war-torn—the novel finds its central truth: that the human heart, whether in Roman marble or modern dust, beats with the same bewildered persistence.

Lee’s characters drift through these worlds like figures glimpsed in a convex mirror—clear, yet refracted by the distortions of fear, love, ambition. Thalia, the young bride ensnared in the cold splendour of Nero’s Rome, moves with a kind of tragic luminosity. Her marriage, at first gilded in hope, soon reveals its hollowness; her husband’s secret life becomes the shadow in every doorway, the chill in every whispered rumour. Yet even as violence and betrayal threaten to extinguish her, a quiet flame endures. Lee renders her with tenderness, as though listening for the faint tremor of a woman’s spirit struggling to be heard beneath the clamour of empire.

In the sunlit present, Tori Benino pursues bones rather than omens, yet she too searches for meaning among ruins. A forensic anthropologist at Herculaneum, she stands between the demands of scholarship and the ambitions of those who would turn history into spectacle. The discovery of a Praetorian’s body, disposed of with furtive haste, becomes her compass point—leading her deeper into the intersecting shadows of politics, violence, and the fragile fictions that men construct to justify their power. Her story, layered with professional resolve and private peril, pulses with the urgency of a woman seeking not only truth but also the courage to bear it.

And then there is Samir, whose grief unfolds in the austere light of contemporary Ukraine. His chapters carry the solemn cadence of testimony—of a man whose life was broken in a single, brutal incursion, yet whose endurance testifies to something quietly indomitable. Through him, Lee draws a line between ancient cataclysm and modern catastrophe, suggesting that the ash of one century settles, inevitably, upon the next.

What distinguishes Lee’s novel is not merely the breadth of its settings but the delicacy with which she renders them. Ancient Rome rises in shimmering detail—its palaces, its narrow streets, its cruel splendour—while present-day Italy is depicted with the affectionate clarity of a traveller lingering over sunlit stucco and the hum of excavation tools. Ukraine, scarred yet stubbornly alive, is sketched with a poignancy that lingers long after the page is turned. One senses the author’s patient research, her reverence for place, her understanding that a landscape can carry its own sorrow.

The prose moves with a rhythm that is almost tidal—pulling the reader close, letting them drift, then drawing them in again with some vivid image: ash drifting like muted snow, a skeleton curled in darkness, an underground Metro glowing faintly while devastation roars above. The effect is both haunting and strangely consoling, as though the novel seeks to assure us that even in ruin, something of humanity persists.

What Remains is, finally, a meditation on endurance—on the ways people fracture, the ways they mend, and the truths that survive even when whole cities do not. Distressing at moments, especially in its portrayal of contemporary Ukraine, it nonetheless possesses a quiet, insistent beauty. Erryn Lee has written a novel that lingers, like dust on the hands, long after the final page is closed.

Five Stars and the Highly Recommended Award of Excellence from The Historical Fiction Company

Award:

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