Rome, September a.d. 96. When the body of Sextus Verpa, a notorious senatorial informer and libertine, is found stabbed to death in his bedroom, his slaves are suspected. Pliny, a very respectable young senator and lawyer,is ordered by the emperor Domitian to investigate. However, the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games, have just begun, and for the next fifteen days the law courts are in recess. If Pliny cant identify the murderer in that time, Verpas entire slave household will be burned alive in the arena.
Pliny teams up with Martial, a starving author of bawdy verses and denizen of the Roman demimonde. Pooling their respective talents, they unravel a plot that involves Jewish and Christian atheists, exotic Egyptian cultists, and a missing horoscope that forecasts the emperors death. Their investigation leads them into the heart of the palace, where no one is safe from the paranoid Domitian.As the deadline approaches, Pliny struggles with the painful dilemma of a good man who is forced to serve a brutal regimea situation familiar in our own age as well.
The novel provides an intimate glimpse into the palaces and tenements, bedrooms and brothels of imperial Romes most opulent and decadent age.
A Poisoned Pen Press Mystery
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadMarriage can be a real killer. One of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time, New York Times bestseller Gillian Flynn takes that statemen...
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FBI agent Alex Cross is on vacation with his family at Disneyland when he gets a call from the Director. A well-known actress was shot outside her home in Beverly Hills. Shortly afterward, an editor for the Los Angeles Times receives an e-mail desc...
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The closer Amos Decker comes to the truth, the deadlier it gets in David Baldacci's latest #1 New York Times bestselling Memory Man thriller.Something sinister is going on in Baronville. The rust belt town has seen four bizarre murders in the spac...
The closer Amos Decker comes to the truth, the deadlier it gets in David Baldacci's latest #1 New York Times bestselling Memory Man thriller.Something sinister is going on in Baronville. The rust belt town has seen four bizarre murders in the spac...
THE NEW MEMORY MAN NOVEL!Amos Decker witnesses a murder just outside FBI headquarters. A man shoots a woman execution-style on a crowded sidewalk, then turns the gun on himself.Even with Decker's extraordinary powers of observation and deduction, t...
It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. It’s ab...
Narrator: Simon Vance,Reg Keeland Published: 09/16/2008
Headstrong Journalist, Anna Rothman knows what suicide looks like - her own husband killed himself five years earlier. When Elly Swift, an agitated passenger beside her on a train, leaves a locket in Anna’s bag before jumping onto the tracks,...
