Rome, AD 72. 'I still can't believe I've put the bastard away for good!' Petro muttered. Petronius Longus, captain of the Aventine watch, and Marcus Didius Falco's oldest friend, has finally nailed one of Rome's top criminals - Balbinus. But under Roman law citizens cannot be imprisoned; instead they are allowed 'time to depart' from the Empire to go into permanent exile. Read More...

Nobody was poisoned at the dinner for the Society of Olive Oil Producers of Baetica, though in retrospect this was quite a surprise... Inimitable sleuth Marcus Didius Falco is back with a vengeance. Read More...

AD 72: To many Rome is the centre of the Empire, to Marcus Didius Falco, Imperial spy and casual informer, it is the home of his mother, the domineering matriarch who has kept the Didius clan together since her husband absconded with a redhead some twenty years before. Read More...

Back in Rome after a dangerous mission to the Roman province of Baetica, Marcus Didius Falco is enjoying a drink of ill-travelled Spanish wine with his old friend Petronius Longus when a man cleaning the local fountain makes a gruesome discovery: a severed human hand. Read More...

It is the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. The days are short, the nights are for wild parties. A general has captured a famous enemy of Rome, and brings her home to adorn his Triumph as a ritual sacrifice. The logistics go wrong; she acquires a mystery illness - then a young man is horrendously murdered and she escapes from house arrest. Read More...

A frightened child approaches Roman informer Marcus Didius Falco, pleading for help. Nobody believes Gaia's story that a relation wants to kill her - and neither does he. Beset by his own family troubles, by his new responsibilities as Procurator of the Sacred Poultry, and by the continuing search for a new partner, he turns her away. Immediately he regrets it. Read More...

Lumbered with working alongside reptilian Chief Spy Anacrites, Falco has hit upon the perfect plan - offering his services to Vespasian and Titus in conducting the 'great Census' of AD 73 as a tax collector with draconian powers. If he does well, his fee will finally allow him to join the middle ranks and wed long-suffering companion Helena Justina. Meanwhile, Falco is needed to trace a relative who has eloped, and has a crazy plan for finding an extinct herb. Read More...

Anna Lee... Private Investigator at Brierly Securities where account books are more important than case files. A missing furniture dealer is revealed to be a fraud, poacher and lecher - and shadowless. Anna heads from London to Exmoor. Read More...

The tip-off could have been a joke. But there was nothing funny about the woman's corpse, clad only in a fur coat and jewellery, that was dragged from the murky waters of the Arno in Florence's foggy dawn. With a murder hunt on his hands, the Marshal soon discovered he was investigating an enigma - a woman everyone said was a recluse, yet who had some very strange friends ... Read More...

As Dr Helen Wilkinson stands over the body of her husband Edward it is just as she had imagined it so many times before. He looks calm, asleep almost... And yet something isn't right: in her fantasies there was never so much blood. How can she convince the police she didn't murder her husband - when she doesn't know herself...? Read More...