Mailer claims he tracked the thief down using his knowledge of Rome's criminal underworld, and apologises for not returning the manuscript sooner, citing his cocaine addiction.

He books himself a tour and meets other members of the group: a Dutch couple, Baron and Baroness Van der Veghel; Sophy Jason, a children's author; Lady Sonia Braceley, an erstwhile society beauty ravaged by years of high living; the Hon.

Sweet returns, then Kenneth; the Baroness insists that everyone pose for a photo in the Mithraeum, then all members of the party reconvene aboveground, but Mailer is missing.

Alleyn tries to reconstruct events at the basilica: Sophy recalls hearing the sarcophagus lid being shut while the Baroness was taking her photograph.

Alleyn conjectures that he slipped out in the near-darkness to meet Mailer with hush-money, found him with Violetta dead at his feet, then murdered him to protect the Baroness.

[4] She describes this in the 1981 edition of her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew: It all seemed, in an odd sort of way, lackadaisical... A group of young men who had been lounging near a motorcycle parked under our windows, half-heartedly turned it over on its side and, after several, unsuccessful attempts, set fire to it and walked away.

[5]Marsh's biographer Margaret Lewis contrasts the flippancy of this with the severity of the rioting that marred her European trip that summer, and suggests the influence that the political climate had on the novel: "the English upper classes are seen as thoroughly corrupt.

Perhaps the heady politics of 1968 were reaching through, and the riot, described so lightly in the second edition of Black Beech and Honeydew, disturbed her more than she wanted to admit".

[8] The hotel-rooftop garden where Grant broods over the loss of his manuscript was inspired by the roof of the pensione in Florence where Marsh stayed later on the same trip.

Keating wrote a very positive review for The Times, saying that Marsh's novels transcended the limits of genre fiction and reached the status of literature.

"[11] Maurice Richardson concluded a capsule review in The Observer, "excellent Roman detailed background for a lively euphoric thriller whodunit".

"[14] When the novel was published in America by Little, Brown and Company the following year, The New York Times commented on the leisurely and atmospheric opening,[a] but the review was largely positive.

[16] A decade later, Kathryne Slate McDorman called Lady Braceley "one of the most pathetic creatures in Marsh's gallery", but offered a feminist perspective: she is aware of no other reality beyond the reflection of herself that she sees in men's expressions... She is the final result, the finished product, of one of high society's most vivid nightmares: the wasted woman who has pawned her very soul for the ephemeral rewards of male approval, and who later finds herself bereft of the means to reclaim it.