Praise for Terry Stanfill:
Realms of Gold: Ritual to Romance is sheer alchemy. Terry Stanfill cleverly masterminds dialing back the time machine in magical, potent ways to reveal a vast fabric of history seamlessly reaching into the depths of the Celtic past. Under her pen, the past revived informs the present in the form of a star-crossed love ignited by a compelling quest, from Puglia to Burgundy, with the famed Vix krater at its vortex. The novel is a masterful tapestry of human aspirations and enterprises, of science and intuition, revealing the author’s profound understanding of the past and her visionary re-crafting of it that leads to the story’s romantic—and historically surprising--revelation. Historian, archaeologist, and antiquarian extraordinaire, Stanfill’s latest novel powerfully evokes living legends from their newly discovered historical sites. --Erik T. Haskell, professor of French Studies & Humanities, Scripps College, Claremont University Center
Terry Stanfill has wonderfully crafted Realms of Gold into a research-oriented mystery romance. A page-turner hard to put down.--Georgianna Erskine, Pasadena, California
Few of us know South Italy as Terry Stanfill does; and her love of this wonderful land shines through every page of her quietly astonishing novel. What a story she tells--threading its way through mythology, ancient history and archaeology in Italy and France and England. Almost a romance, almost a thriller yet not quite either, it possesses a unique character of its own. I loved it. --John Julius Norwich, author of A History of the Normans in South Italy and Sicily
Stanfill's (The Blood Remembers, 2001) novel follows an unlikely pair of lovers as they piece together an ancient puzzle that will shed light on an age-old mystery. In 1953, an archaeological team working in Vix, a small town in the Burgundy region of France, found the 2,500-year-old tomb of a woman some claim to have been a Celtic princess. The burial site, surprisingly well preserved, housed both the woman's body and a treasure of immeasurable value that included a perfectly intact krater (a ritual wine vessel) likely cast in Southern Italy. While the groundbreaking find revealed much, it left many questions unanswered: Who was this mysterious woman? Why was she entombed with such treasure? And what was the origin of the foreign urn? These questions-which still vex experts today-drive Stanfill's scintillating tale of intellectual discovery and budding romance. In contemporary Venice, Bianca Evans Caldwell-an American author-crosses paths with archaeologist Giovanni de Serlo at a wedding and immediately falls for the suave, confident Italian. But neither suspect that this chance meeting would send them both on a continent-spanning adventure that will help solve the mysteries of the Vix krater and the sleeping princess, all the while delivering surprising new insights into the mythology of England and France. Stanfill's narrative initially feels ornate, but it morphs into a lively, precise plot. The author pours her estimable learning into this, her fourth novel, and she's equally comfortable writing about the nuances of ancient art, the links between myth and history, and the nooks and crannies of modern-day Italy. And though her book seems by turns a travel guide or an archaeology textbook, its details only add verisimilitude to a satisfyingly complex story of love, learning and intrigue in Europe. An erudite thriller that recalls Brown's Robert Langdon series-only smarter.
