DISCOVERY

What happens when one of Manhattan's most glamorous couples makes a discovery beyond their wildest dreams - a discovery that transports them back into time, into the mysterious and sometimes dangerous passages of an ancient world?

The globe-trotting curators of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrew and Olivia Foster - familiar to reader's of Thomas Hoving's first hit novel, Masterpiece - have it all.He's a charming rapscallion with a taste for practical jokes and a low tolerance for stodgy museum types. She's a woman with a sixth sense for spotting elusive art treasures, a woman as comfortable on a camel's back as in a Cadillac. Together, they thought they'd seen everything.

Then, on sabbatical in the golden hills surrounding Naples, the Fosters make the archaeological discovery of a lifetime, a discovery which changes their lives forever. Spurred on by the subtle machinations of Count Don Ciccio Nerone (the world's wiliest and most eccentric art collector and connoisseur), the Fosters, aided by an arsenal of high-tech archaeological tools, succeed in unearthing a discovery more intriguing that the Tomb of Tutankhamen or the Temple of Aphrodite.

For nearly two thousand years, the Palace of Tertullian, pride of the lost city of Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, has remained undisturbed. Efforts to uncover its legendary treasures have lead to disappointment -and death.