My editor at Head of Zeus writes, “Hello Dana,
The US team have asked if you would complete a quick Q&A – this is aimed at the US book trade and should be a nice boost for Tetisheri in the run-up to publication.”

Here you go, Greg.

Q&A for Dana Stabenow

1. Your gripping Eye of Isis series is set in Cleopatra’s Egypt. Why did you choose to write in that period of history?
   
   TL;DR: I’ve been interested in her character since listening as a 12-year old to a vinyl recording of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, produced by The Marlowe Society with a cast that included Diana Rigg, who, alas, voiced Octavia, not the title role. In London in 1987 I saw Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins perform it live at the Old Vic in London. You have not lived unless and until you have seen Judi Dench writhe across the floor in sexual longing for her absent lover.
   
   In 2001 in Chicago I saw a Smithsonian exhibit called Cleopatra of Egypt: from History to Myth, which concluded in a convincing argument that most of what I’d learned about Cleopatra (and pretty much everything Shakespeare thought he knew) had come from historians who were to a man totally in the bag for Augustus Caesar, who had a pretty big ax to grind. And then in 2010 Stacy Schiff wrote her biography, Cleopatra, which exposed me to more and better historical context of that time and place and how life was lived then than I had ever before encountered in a lifetime of dabbling in the subject. There was no going back after that.
   
   
2. With 3 books published in the series so far, including Death of an Eye, Disappearance of a Scribe, and Theft of an Idol, what can readers expect from the forthcoming Abduction of a Slave?
   
   In a life lived contemporaneously with Julius Caesar, of course there would be war and many, many battles. I wanted Tetisheri to be an eyewitness to at least one and I fretted for most of the first three books over how to accomplish that. (You know, without getting her killed, which would kind of put a period to her life and I’m not done with her yet, see below.) Then a memory surfaced of Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals telling the story of Lincoln driving out from Washington, D.C. to watch the battle at Richmond. But what could bring Tetisheri to Carthage/Cyrenaica/
   Mauretania/the west of North Africa to begin with? Ah, thereby begins our tale.
   
   
3. Looking ahead, what lies in store for Tetisheri, Cleopatra, and the city of Alexandra? Where do you see the story taking them in future instalments?
   
   I began the first three Tetisheri books with a quote from Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time: ‘Honestly, I think all historians are mad.’ I didn’t use it for this fourth in the series because, really, given how much I owe people like Schiff and Adrienne Mayor and Joyce Tildesley and too many more to count I should probably cut them some slack. But I must say that it is nearly impossible to find any Cleopatra biographer to agree on anything about Cleopatra with any other Cleopatra biographer, including who her mother was and when she was born. This is great for fiction, as it means I can make shit right up and thumb my nose at anyone who yells at me for getting things wrong. 
   
   All this by way of being a lead in to Cleopatra in Rome. Yes, she was there when Caesar died, pretty much the only thing everyone agrees on, but how long she was there before the Ides of March–pphhhht. One eminent historian posits the notion that she arrived in Rome just after Caesar left for Spain to put down the last of the Pompeiians. It’s like that historian never met a woman, let alone a ruler whose backside was resting pretty uneasily on a throne her own people had been rebelling against for the entirety of her family’s 300-year reign, OR someone who was hated and feared by nearly everyone in Rome. Yeah, sure, she’d hop right on that boat.
   
   Isis4 ends with the battle of Thapsus, in May 46 BCE. That puts a year and nine months between Tetisheri and Cleopatra and March 15, 44 BCE, with lots going on between including the battle of Munda. I expect Cleopatra will have plenty for Tetisheri to do during that time. The seventh in the series may be set in Rome…and it may not. Check back with me in a couple of years.
   
   
4. How would you compare Tetisheri to your other great sleuth, Kate Shugak, how do their personalities differ, putting aside the 2000 year time difference?

They are both smart, observant women with fraught histories they had to overcome to become the decent, capable people they are. They are both champions of the underdog; Tetisheri girls and women held in the durance vile so prevalent in her day, Kate her fellow Park rats. Tetisheri lives at the very heart of her time in crowded, bustling Alexandria; Kate in a location so remote with such an impossible road that you have to fly in or wait till the river freezes up or thaws out to get there. Kate’s twenty years older than Tetisheri but then in Tetisheri’s time people were dead ten years by Kate’s age so people grew up a lot faster. It always gives me a slight shock when I remember that Cleopatra died at Kate’s age.

5. If you had to choose, name your three favourite historical crime books?
   
   The first one I ever read is still the best one I ever read and my favorite: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.
   Thinking, thinking…excuse me while I get up and go over to my bookshelves…ah, yes.
   Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. I defy you to find another novel that so vividly illustrates how Rome actually smelled back in the day. Not historical crime, sorry, but time travel, and pretty dated in its worldview, but still very much worth reading.
   Madeleine E. Robins’ Sarah Tolerance trilogy set in London in 1810, Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner, and how I wish there were more. You will believe a woman could be a private inquiry agent in Regency England. 

Abduction of a Slave, the fourth Eye of Isis novel, publishes in January 2025. I’ll be launching the book at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale. Hope to see you there!

*Preorder your signed first edition hardcover here.
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