Explosive fiction

Volcanoes are a passion for Anne Maria Nicholson. Photo / Supplied

As a child growing up in the central North Island, Anne Maria Nicholson climbed Tongariro and Ruapehu. And that was it - volcanoes were in her veins.

Although she went on to become a Sydney-based TV reporter, she never lost her fascination with them. It led to her first novel, the best-selling Weeping Waters, based on the Tangiwai disaster. And to research the sequel, that fascination has taken her to Italy and the world's most dangerous volcano, Vesuvius.

"There are something like 14,000 volcanoes around the world," Nicholson says, "so the book could have been set anywhere, but I felt it had to be Italy. Vesuvius is so dangerous because millions of people live around it. You can't stop an eruption, you can only get away from it.

"But on a normal day in Naples the traffic is so bad you can barely get a car down the street so can you imagine what would happen in an emergency?"

Nicholson, a senior reporter with the ABC in Australia, went to live in Naples while she researched Pliny's Warning (HarperCollins, $34.99) and spent time interviewing scientists and archaeologists about the threat Vesuvius poses.

She takes a very journalistic approach to research and is unafraid to knock on doors and ask tough questions.

"I walk the walk is what I like to say. I'm very comfortable with that. Reporting is what I do and I love it, whereas writing fiction is the big challenge."

In Pliny's Warning she has bound together fact and fiction quite tightly. The book returns to the character of vulcanologist Frances Nelson and, although some sections are set on White Island, it is mostly concerned with the real-life political and social scandals besetting Naples.

"It's a place where there are no boundaries of human life that people won't cross for money," Nicholson says. Although she touches on the city's well-publicised toxic rubbish problem, at the core of the story is an issue that hasn't received so much international attention - continued building in what is known as the red zone, the path of the lava flow of previous eruptions.

Nicholson interviewed the experts trying to predict what would happen if the volcano were to blow again, which areas of Naples would be destroyed and how long people would have to evacuate.

She found huge dissension among scientists and that the Italian government was reluctant to listen to what would happen if the worst happened.