The Wolf Den (Volume 1) (Wolf Den Trilogy)

The Wolf Den largely takes place in a Roman brothel of the same name, in the city of Pompeii. The title is not inaccurate. Although the main reading of it comes from a quirk of Latin, making the word for prostitute the same as the word for a female wolf, it also offers another, more interesting reading. The women in this novel make up a pack of wolves themselves: fierce, loyal, cutthroat, and hungry. Yet, lupine as they are, the protagonists are some of the most human I have encountered in a book about the Roman Empire.

I expected to find The Wolf Den interesting for its unorthodox subject matter, since so many books about Ancient Rome focus on the men (and it was a very masculine civilization). I did not expect to fall in love with it, which I did all too easily. Amara and her fellows are flawed, strong, and incredibly compelling. Even when they made choices that I found distasteful, I understood why they did them. Better still, those choices seemed like part of the character as much as they served the story as a whole. I can’t wait for the rest of the series to reach the United States.