This interchange between both of you takes me back to my original reading of the novel. As you know, it's one of my all-time favorites. Having been to Pompeii and being escorted by an archeological guide, I so want the meditation chamber to be real and to be able to meditate within it.

Thank you for The Reading Room, Ryan 

BTW: "SerpentFirewalk" has a very special meaning for me, and I believe this is a safe place for me to use it. 

I grew up in the Church of England, so it was normal for me to see married clergy. I really enjoyed Michael and Hana finally marrying.

I read with a very open mind, I think I assume that all of the books I read are real - they are to me, at least while I’m reading them, and quite possibly that’s how they settle into my mind afterwards, depending on how memorable they were. (This is coming from a person who trained herself to forget a book, so I could reread them without feeling I knew what was going to happen by the time I’d gotten to page 5.)

I didn’t even notice the clock. I think we deal with time in so many different formats, in the world today, that the Roman doesn’t really matter. Time becomes an impression. Something we have deal with only when we have to be somewhere or do something at a particular time. I’m also retired. I haven’t worked for years, so the occasions I have to be in a particular place at a set time have become few. (Even television isn’t on a fixed schedule anymore, we watch it whenever it suits us!)

I was particularly interested in your comments about faith. Although I am agnostic, I have always been deeply fascinated by religion—its history, its influence on civilization, and perhaps most of all, the people who sincerely believe. I think that distance actually helps me write Michael Dominic. I don’t need to share his faith in order to respect it or to understand why it is fundamental to the person he is.

Your observation about institutions also gets to the heart of something I try to explore in these books. The Vatican, a bank, a government, or any other institution is ultimately made up of human beings, and human beings are capable of both remarkable goodness and terrible abuses of power. Your quotation—“If you want to really get to know a person, give them power”—could almost serve as an epigraph for several of my novels!

It also gives me enormous pleasure to hear you describe Michael and the others as being almost like old friends. After spending so many years with these characters myself, knowing that readers have become invested not only in the mysteries but also in their lives and relationships is particularly gratifying.

And I agree with you about hope. My novels may take the characters into some very dark places, and they don’t always emerge without scars, but I don’t have much interest in leaving readers with the message that darkness inevitably wins. There is quite enough of that in the real world.

Thank you again for reading so attentively and for sharing your thoughts with me. I hope the next German edition will prove worthy of another five stars!

With my very best wishes,

Gary

I recently finished The Pompeian Betrayal and wanted to share a few thoughts with you.

When I first began reading your books, I assumed that someone who wrote so extensively and knowledgeably about the Vatican must have a strong religious background. I was therefore surprised to discover that you are agnostic. That struck a chord with me. I was raised Protestant and went to Sunday school when I was young, but as the years passed, my own experiences led me away from religious belief. I have great respect for those who find meaning and comfort in faith, but it has never played that role in my own life.

Perhaps that is one reason I have been so surprised by how interested I have become in the history of the Vatican through your novels. It is a world I never expected to find particularly compelling, yet I now find myself wanting to know more about it. Just as importantly, Father Michael Dominic and the people around him have become familiar companions. Following their lives from book to book is now part of the pleasure of reading the series.

The Pompeian Betrayal gave me plenty to think about. Beneath the suspense and intrigue are some genuinely philosophical questions about human nature, power, morality, and the choices people make when their principles are tested. I particularly enjoyed the fact that these larger ideas were incorporated into the story without allowing them to overwhelm the plot.

I was also pleased that, despite the scars left by everything the characters endure, good ultimately prevails. I think there is something valuable in that. A good thriller can take us into some very dark places, but I still want to finish a story with a sense that courage, decency, and hope matter.

One theme that stayed with me afterward was the danger of condemning an entire institution because of the actions of individuals within it. Whether we are talking about a church, a bank, a government, or any other powerful organization, institutions are ultimately made up of people. Some use their positions honorably; others abuse them. There is an old observation that if you really want to discover someone’s character, give that person power. The Pompeian Betrayal illustrates that idea particularly well.

Another pleasure was seeing the continuing development of Michael, Hana, and the other recurring characters. After spending several books with them, their personal journeys have become nearly as important to me as the historical mysteries themselves.

One thing does puzzle me: I see many readers awarding the book high star ratings without actually writing anything about why they enjoyed it. That’s unfortunate, because I find it interesting to hear what other readers noticed in a story and whether they came away thinking about the same things I did.

Once again, you have managed to combine history, intrigue, ideas, and suspense into a story that entertained me while also giving me something to consider after I finished the final page.

I am very much looking forward to the next German edition in the series. The Pompeian Betrayal certainly earns five stars from me.

Set against the turbulent years leading up to the Civil War, the novel takes readers into an America where the question of slavery was no longer something the country could postpone confronting. McDonald brings that period to life not simply through historical events, but through people forced to make difficult choices about freedom, conscience, loyalty, and courage.

What particularly impressed me is the sense of historical authenticity. The world of the novel feels lived in rather than reconstructed for our benefit. The history provides the foundation, but it never overwhelms the characters or the story. That balance is difficult to achieve in historical fiction, and it’s one of the things I appreciate most about the book.

Readers of my own novels know how much I enjoy stories in which the past becomes something immediate and consequential rather than merely a backdrop. On Free Ground approaches history in a very different setting from my Vatican thrillers, but it shares that conviction: history is ultimately about human beings making choices, often without knowing what those choices will eventually mean.

If historical fiction is among your interests—or if you simply enjoy a compelling story grounded in a fascinating and deeply consequential period of American history—I think On Free Ground is well worth your time.

Highly recommended. Publication date November 1, 2026.

Great question. I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of history, religion, and mystery—particularly those moments when the historical record leaves just enough unanswered to make you wonder, What if?

The Vatican was an irresistible setting because it sits at the center of nearly two thousand years of history. Its archives contain the records of popes, kings, wars, scandals, scientific discoveries, political intrigue, and some of the most consequential events in Western history. For a thriller writer, that’s an extraordinary amount of material to work with.

What interests me most, though, isn’t religion itself so much as history and the people who shaped it. I enjoy taking something that is genuinely historical—a document, an artifact, a controversy, a person—and asking where the established history ends and a plausible fictional story might begin. That’s really the foundation of the Vatican Secret Archive thrillers.

And once Father Michael Dominic, Hana Sinclair, and the rest of the characters began to take shape, the series became as much about them and their relationships as it was about whatever mystery they happened to be chasing. At this point, I suspect that’s a large part of what keeps me coming back to this world book after book.

Every so often a book starts with a question I can't shake. This one began with a simple accounting problem. When Alexander VI died in August 1503—Cesare bedridden with the same fever that killed his father, the cardinals already circling—the Borgia treasury was among the most coveted in Europe. Within weeks, much of it was gone. Some of that dispersal is documented: seized by rivals, spent on Cesare's dwindling army, quietly reclaimed by families the Borgias had bled. But there are gaps in the record that historians have argued over for five centuries. Money and relics don't simply evaporate. Someone moved them.

That "someone" became the Sisters of the Sacred Vigil—a sodality founded in the chaos of 1503, still keeping its promise more than five hundred years later, and led today by a woman who learned her tradecraft in Italian military intelligence rather than a convent. I wanted an antagonist who wasn't a villain in the cartoon sense, but a keeper of an oath so old that its original purpose had long since curdled into something else.

And of course this was the book where Michael and Hana finally marry—at her villa in Èze, on the Côte d'Azur, with Karl standing as best man, Sister Teri as bridesmaid, and Cardinal Severino coming out of his monastery to officiate. I've had that scene in my head for years. Writing it while a conspiracy closed in around the wedding party was the most fun I've had at the keyboard in a long while.

So, a few things I'm curious about:

1. The Sisters. Mother Superior Agnese Visconti believes she is protecting something sacred. Did you find her sympathetic at any point—or did her military past make her impossible to trust from the start? Would you have preferred a more conventionally sinister order?

2. The wedding. Twelve books is a long courtship. Did the marriage feel earned? And for readers who followed the papal decree allowing Michael to remain a priest and Prefect—does that arrangement work for you as the series moves forward, or does it raise questions you'd like to see the next books confront?

3. The ledger and the reliquary. The investigation turns on a hidden account book and a relic that shouldn't exist. I try to keep these plausible—every archive in Rome has objects whose provenance is a shrug. Which discovery in the book made you stop and think "that could actually be real"? Which strained your belief?

4. The clock. Longtime readers may have noticed this is the first book I've written using 24-hour time throughout. Did you notice? Did it change the feel of the pacing, or was it invisible?

And one open question, because I ask it of myself after every book: what do you think the Sisters were really guarding? Not the object—the idea behind it.

I read every reply here. Pull up a chair.

—Gary