Jess Venner's The Lost Voices of Pompeii offers an innovative study of Pompeii's final day that examines a vibrant culture and its people in the moments before destruction. On October 24, 79 CE, the 20,000 or so people of Pompeii were going about their daily business when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted spectacularly, and the town forever became known for "how it ended rather than how it lived." Venner uses an emerging methodology called "evidence-based storytelling" or "critical fabulation" to reveal aspects of Pompeian society through a cross section of its residents. Venner's novelistic reconstructions of ordinary people (i.e., "the lost voices") begin each chapter as she depicts what life may have been like for a slave, a wealthy businesswoman, a fish sauce merchant, an enterprising innkeeper, a working-poor family, an ambitious politician, and a dutiful priest of Isis. Though it reads more like "faction," (a blend of fact and fiction), this approach is a clever vehicle to explore aspects of ancient Roman culture--the experiences of the "invisible slave," or women in business who "went against the grain" of Roman expectations of a female in society, for example. Venner's sharp assessment of archeological evidence, inscriptions, and material culture, meanwhile, grounds the accounts in verifiable fact. The taut narrative climaxes with the volcano's eruption, when each character confronts the end of life as they know it. The Lost Voices of Pompeii is a fresh and enthralling meditation on the residents who shaped Pompeii and were shaped by it. --Peggy Kurkowski, freelance book reviewer in Denver