[1] Three large villas overlooking Lake Nemi are owned by the wealthy, glamorous American Maggie Radcliffe who has recently remarried to Italian Marchese Berto.

Kirkus Reviews states that the novel is "An elegant, wayward divertimento lighter than the soft Italian air of the Alban hills....Muriel Spark's most ambitious in some years.

It can be read as a decorative, self-perpetuating comedy of urbane truths and consequences, or, as also intended, as a reprise and renewal of pagan mythology when our own Christian morality has been so decadently depreciated.

[2] Margaret Drabble writing in The New York Times writes "We all like gloss: we like to read of those so wealthy that they can no longer afford to insure their possessions, and we love to suffer vicariously as they attempt to foil their predators...Muriel Spark raises the question: what lies beneath this dazzling game?

And, as ever, she leaves us on our own, for most of the book, to try to answer it... Muriel Spark drops her enigmatic allusions for long enough to tell us, plainly, that she is writing about money.

In a couple of brilliant paragraphs, she describes the change that overtook the world in 1973, with the rise of Arab oil power and the fear of global recession."