The Rome Prophecy
by Jon Trace
Sphere, pp464
ISBN: 978-0-7515-4301-8

Aside from being the pseudonym for the Chief Creative Officer of one of the world’s largest global television productions, Jon Trace also happens to be a thriller writer as well as an award-winning creator of multimedia interactive games and a documentary maker. This is enough fodder for those who dare not pronounce that dreaded clichéd adjective, dilettante, until they get to the end of the book in order to acknowledge that they were right in the first place.

In The Rome Prophecy, Mr Trace first introduces us to the ancient manuscript of Cassandra, in which the same Cassandra laments her persecution and torture through the streets of Rome after her senator husband accused her of jilting him. Cassandra is led to the Bocca della Verità where her arm is then chopped off, amid the egg and tomato-throwing of the spectators and the lashings she is subjected to by the soldiers.

The story then zaps to present day Rome where the beautiful Valentina Morassi, who with her long raven hair and curvaceous body is certainly Mr Trace’s nightly dream muse, has just been promoted to Captain after solving a very difficult case in Venice with former LA priest Tom Shaman. With regards to this case, Mr Trace has dedicated a whole novel preceding this one entitled The Venice Conspiracy.

Since this novel takes place in macho Italy, it does not take a genius to realise that those in higher ranks (obviously men) will do anything to belittle Valentina, backstab her and call out Mr Berlusconi’s name to reprimand her by saying that had he not been Italy’s premier, no beautiful brainless female would obtain such a promotion. It is no surprise either that Mr Trace comes to her rescue each and every time and, Mr Berlusconi or not, takes it as his duty as the writer to make her look smart, scheming but tactically harmonious in order to keep those against her at bay.

The story sets off when a severed hand is found and soon after traces lead to a young woman who is covered in blood and who head-butts Morassi when the latter tries to ask her questions. The woman is soon diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and morphs into different female personalities including an eight-year-old child. Another of the personalities she adopts is that of Claudia, a Sabine woman.

The young woman, Anna Fratelli, is taken care of by a very capable psychologist, Louisa Verdetti. Just like Morassi, Verdetti is hassled by her boss, an older male as well as a pervert, who cannot stand young, competent females working for him. Another interesting man is Professor Enrico Ferrari, a forensic expert, who finds that the blood on Fratelli’s dress does not match that of the severed hand.

Ferrari has issues of obesity and has issues with the female sex. His crush on Morassi is another ingénue of Mr Trace to persuade the reader of Morassi’s allure.

The plot thickens when Shaman, who becomes Morassi’s buff American lover, discovers the dead body of a eunuch close to the river Tiber. Once again the blood on the eunuch’s body does not match that on Anna Fratelli’s clothing.

The connection that Morassi makes together with Shaman’s help is that clues they find lead to religious and historical quests especially those associated with the story of the rape of the Sabine women.

In the times of the early history of Rome, rape meant “abduction” rather than sexual violation, which leads to an underground labyrinth in Rome of 2010 where children and females are detained as part of the cult of the Sabine women. Young boys raised in the cult are forcefully castrated.

The Rome Prophecy is disconnected and lacks coherency. Mr Trace seems to make a very hard effort to convey a lot of threads in one novel, the result of which is a book that is inconclusive on many levels. We never understand if Verdetti manages to face Valducci’s menacing remarks and why Shaman is on the run again. All taken into consideration, one should not exclude the idea that this will be explained in another sequel.

• Ms Gatt is a teacher at St Augustine’s school for boys and has an MA in English in modern and contemporary literature and literary theory.

This book is available at Word for Word.