The Wonder Chamber
Professor Lizzie Manning is creating a centennial exhibition for her college’s one hundredth anniversary. Discovering that the founder’s daughter married an Italian prince with a family collection dating from the Renaissance, she travels to Bologna, where she finds ancient alligators, old master paintings, and unicorn tusks, among other rarities. But it is the unexpected mummified occupant of a sarcophagus that begs the most attention, and draws her into a mystery that spans ancient Egypt and German-occupied Italy of the 1940s.
Praise for Mary Malloy’s The Wandering Heart:
“An impressive fiction debut. . . . Malloy mixes history and fantasy with flair and delivers a wonderfully satisfying puzzler.”Publishers Weekly
“Mystery a la gothic. . . . Historian Malloy does her research proud, inserting humanity into the too-often dry history some of us suffered through in school.”Mystery Scene
“Malloy’s use of medieval tales, the Knights Templar history, ancient artifacts, and naval history deftly guides the reader deeper into the character and her motivations. . . . This novel itself reads like a seafaring voyagefull of swift turns, unknown frontiers, and the desire to answer the big questions we all ask ourselves.”ForeWord
“Malloy provides a terrific tense thriller.”Midwest Book Review
Mary Malloy is the author of four non-fiction works of maritime or ethnographic history and four novels. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University, where her dissertation was on the maritime fur trade to the Northwest Coast and the collecting of artifacts for New England museums. She taught maritime and environmental history for twenty-five years at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, MA, and made several voyages to the north and south Pacific with college undergraduates. Mary taught Museum Studies at the Harvard Extension School for twelve years, winning the Petra Shattuck teaching award in 2010.
