In the long hot Roman Summer of AD74 Marcus Didius Falco private informer & spare-time poet gives a reading for his family & friends. Things get out of hand as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus a wealthy Greek banker & patron to a group of struggling writers who offers to publish Falcos work
- a golden opportunity that rapidly palls. A visit to the Chrysippusscriptorium implicates him in a gruesome literary murder so when Petronius Longus the over-worked vigiles enquiry chief commissions him to investigate Falco is forced to accept. Lindsey Davis twelfth novel wittily explores Roman publishing & banking taking us from the jealousies of authorship & the mire of patronage to the darker financial world where default can have fatal consequences...