Falco is hired by two of the Hortensii, a group of freed slaves who have parlayed the legacy of their former owner into a fortune (which they display to vulgar excess), to investigate the thrice-widowed fiancee of one of their members. While Falco tries to prove that Severina Zotica has murdered her previous husbands, her betrothed is poisoned at a dinner with a notoriously unscrupulous developer and the detective must dig for other motives. Arson, evictions, skyrocketing rents, layered mortgage deals, another murder, near death for Helena and a brutal beating for himself spur Falco to ferret out the truth about the Hortensii and Severina.

When wild Germanic troops rebel and a Roman general disappears, Emperor Vespasian turns to the one man he can trust: Marcus Didius Falco, Imperial Rome's answer to Columbo. Slipping undercover into Germania, Falco meets with disarray, torture, and murder in his quest to find a Druid priestess who alone can persuade the barbarians to embrace peace.

Poseidon's Gold #5      16.5 hours      unabridged      Donal Donelly      MP3

After six months in wild Germania, imperial gumshoe Marcus Didius Falco is back in Rome sweet Rome. But his apartment has been ransacked. And although he desperately needs 400,000 sesterces in order to marry his aristocratic love, Helena, his only client is his mother, who insists that he find out whether the scandalous claims against his dead brother, Festus, are true.

Then the chief tarnisher of Festus's good name is murdered, and Marcus becomes the prime suspect. Someone is definitely fiddling with the scales of justice. The more Marcus hunts for the thread that will lead him out of this doom-laden labyrinth of misery and mystery, the less his life is worth. Except, as seems likely, as a meal for the Emperor's hungry lions...

Last Act in Palmyra #6      19 hours      unabridged      Donal Donelly      MP3

Falco was denied a promised promotion into the upper class by the emperor Vespasian after his last escapade (in Poseidon's Gold), a promotion required for him to marry his lover, the patrician Helena Justina. To get out of town with Helena, he takes on a job for one of the emperor's less trustworthy underlings, heading for Syria to do a little snooping; at the same time he's also on the lookout for a runaway girl who may have been kidnapped by a Syrian. While sightseeing, Falco and Helena discover, in a cistern, the body of a playwright who had been with an acting troupe out of Rome. For various reasons, Falco and Helena sign on with the troupe in order to find the killer, with Falco taking on the little appreciated duties of the playwright for cover.

When Balbinus Pius, a notorious underworld figure, is exiled from Rome by order of Emperor Vespasian, a power vacuum is created in the seamy underbelly of Roman society. While vice lords and hustlers scramble to claim a piece of Pius' territory, a virulent outbreak of crime sweeps the city, terrorizing honest citizens and infuriating the emperor. At the behest of Vespasian, Marcus Didius Falco, a renegade investigator with imperial ties, joins forces with staunch public officer Petronius Longus and launches an investigation. As Falco and Petro embark upon their mission, they begin to suspect that Balbinus Pius has orchestrated an ingenious plot to retain control of his evil dominion. In order to expose Pius, they must go undercover and stake out a notorious brothel, endangering both their reputations and their lives.

Falco attempts networking to boost his career. A disastrous night ends with a hangover and murder; he doesn't achieve even a smile from the dancing girl, then he finds himself forced to take responsibility for his desperately injured enemy, the Chief Spy Anacrites. Mere weeks before Helena is due to give birth, Falco and she set off to unravel an oily conspiracy in southern Spain. Lying in wait are tycoons with low motives, murderous women in disguise, and a slippery trail laid by the Roman equivalent of that bureaucratic nightmare, the Admin Trainee; he knows nothing, thinks he can do everything, and wants something more than is good for the Empire. Falco believes the power of the privileged may be impossible to thwart - and for devious commercial motives, even the Emperor may not welcome his attempt. Will the lamps dim and the scented bath oil run out in Rome? And will Falco keep his promise to be with Helena at the dangerous moment when their baby is born?

The first in a loosely planned trilogy in which Falco succumbs to pressure and tries to find a partner to work with: here, his best friend Petronius Longus. Petro's life is in every kind of crisis, so perhaps the last thing he needs is to join Falco in a search for the serial killer who has been dumping dismembered bodies in the aqueducts. Lacking forensic tools, hampered by administrative indifference, and dogged by the tiresome Anacrites - now championed by Falco's Ma, who thinks he's wonderful - the new partners discover unexpected tensions that may destroy their relationship; that's assuming Petro's dangerous girlfriend gangster's daughter Milvia doesn't do for him first. Or her terrible mother. As the author faces up to the task of handling a gruesome story in a sensitive manner, convention decrees that the killer is bound to attack someone we know - but who?…

This is the one where Falco buys the site of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli and says nobody with taste and money would live there.

Now it's stippling and scumbling: fun with home makeovers - until the latest machinations of cast-off lover Anacrites pose a darker threat than normal. Falco and Helena take as many of their family as possible away from danger. Five years after they met in Britain, they go back there - to the fabulous royal palace at Fishbourne, its grand extension still on the drawing board and likely to remain there without careful management. Public Building projects never run smoothly, but few have as many hitches as this one. Two different architects jostling to take charge of the site don't help - though that may be dealt with - and the place is awash with dodgy contractors. 

From the odoriferous gift left behind by bath house supremos, Gloccus and Cotta, to the fresher corpse in the Great King's opulent quarters (and the other body!) Falco faces one challenge after another, all the time auditing scams for Vespasian and trying to teach his grumbling assistants how to be of use to him. Will he ever get to London? (No, but then he doesn't want to go!) A night out watching a dancer sounds excellent relaxation - but the dancer may be Perella, Anacrites' murderous agent, the dive where she whirls her stuff is a dingy downtown bar full of fighting labourers, and even the artwork may turn nasty. Not the moment for toothache, especially with a dentist you don't know. 

Beer but no oysters… It's holiday time for Falco and Helena - until a character he had disposed of reappears, dead, and causes a diplomatic incident. Naturally Julius Frontinus and Flavius Hilaris are thrilled that they have Falco on hand to sort it for them.

Although Londinium is at the end of the world, it's attracting all kinds of entrepreneurs: the best kind, the worst kind, and lawyers. Most of the streets are not even paved, yet they are as mean as in any city where the bad guys think they own the place. Bad women lie in wait as well, and some of them already know where hard man Falco has his soft spots. With an angry wife, a moody sister, Maia's increasingly dubious suiters, and a fractious Petronius, Falco has enough to contend with. Then he gets lumbered with an outraged king, a traumatised orphan, corruption, inefficiency, and British fast food outlets.

Plus Chloris. He knows Chloris. He knows her all too well.
Personal tragedy and political crises vie for the attention of both Falco and Petro, the one with a job he doesn't want, the other with a task he can't admit, and both dogged by faces from their past…

Needing to re-establish their presence in Rome, Falco and Associates become embroiled in the legal manoeuvres of Silius Italicus and Paccius Africanus, real-life uppercrust informers who thrive on exploiting the sins of the rich. Rubirius Metellus, an average senator (corrupt, nasty, hated by his relatives and possibly incestuous) has committed suicide to avoid paying his bills. It's a neat trick if you can get away with it, but he won't because Silius wants his huge fees and Paccius is advising most of the family, including the favoured ex-daughter-in-law, while M Didius Falco is on hand to defend old-fashioned concepts like justice for the innocent. Aulus takes an interest in agnates, Quintus gains an heir, Helena distrusts the ingénue and Falco risks his future using oratorical skills we have never imagined he owns. With poisoned pills, magic practices, women in labour, old Senate scandals and an appearance from dumb judge Marponius lined up, things are tricky even before the impiety charge – and that may be the end of everything...

All those doubters who query 'Was there really a Daily Gazette?' will find the Acta Diurna carefully explained to shut them up. Falco visits Petronius and his favourite brother-in-law, Gaius Baebius, at Ostia while on a missing person hunt for a vanished scribe. Fun and frights and family pressures colour a sunny adventure beside the sea (NB we know our Hero cannot swim...) There would be pirates – had not Pompey cleared the seas of pirates, as everybody knows. Perhaps we shall learn what pirates do when they are not being pirates any more.

At least, Falco assures himself, there are no dead bodies in this one. Regular readers will know what that means. A little boy comes to tell the vigiles that his mummy won't wake up, for starters. The topiarist in fear of his life. Even Gaius Baebius takes sick leave. And that's before we meet the sailors who want to play games with their gangplank, the mysterious Illyrian (who may not be Illyrian at all), the boy racer speeding in the flash chariot at rush hour, and the girl with too many romantic ideas.

The Greeks had a word for everything – and the Romans invented the rest. The Golden Age of tourism was the First Century AD, when the site guides – then as now - babbled incomprehensibly, the hotels were always under construction and when things went wrong, the travel companies did not want to know. Mountain scenery was panoramic but roads were rough, beds were hard (where they were available), fellow travellers were ghastly and the weather could only be relied upon to be foul. Those who died abroad knew the Roman port authorities would try to charge import duty on their ashes, especially if they came home in a luxury urn…

Aulus, now a model student, has met an interesting man. He has heard an intriguing story about two dead women at the ancient site of the Olympic Games. His mind is supposed to be set on Athens not athletics, so Falco is sent out to ensure the scholar finds his university without being sidetracked by sport, corpses, or the Seven Wonders of the World. There are sites, sights, statues, oracles, and curiosities of foreign food. The Roman governor is on holiday. The gods, when they are not angry, are decidedly bilious.

It is the Season of Misrule in Rome, sheer misery for Falco. Uppity slaves give orders to their cringing masters, masters try to hide in their studies, women are goosed, statues wobble, a prince has a broken heart, Helena’s brother will not decide if his heart is broken or not, children are sick and even the dog can’t stand it any more. As the festival meant for healing grudges riotously proceeds, a young man who has everything to live for dies a horrific death while the security of the Empire is compromised by the usual mixture of top brass incompetence, bureaucratic in-fighting and popular indifference. The barbarians are not just at the gates, they are right inside - and that’s just the bombasts in the Praetorian Guard, encouraged by the pernicious Chief Spy.

Doctors are making a killing. Alternative therapists are ecstatic. Members of the Didius family are about to receive some extremely unusual seasonal gifts. But for the non-persons on the fringes of society life is not so jolly, and dark spirits walk abroad (available for hire through the usual agents). Falco has a race against time to find a dangerous missing person, aided and hindered by faces from the past, while running the gauntlet of the best and worst Roman society can offer as Saturnalia entertainment. Unfortunately for him.

Falco, Helena and their immediate family, including Aulus, go to Roman Egypt to see more of the Seven Wonders of the World. Uncle Fulvius and Cassius, later joined by Pa, are up to some pensioners' scam, getting in the way, while Falco looks into high academic culture at the Great Library. This is home to all the knowledge of the world - though when the corpses start appearing in the customary odd circumstances, it takes more than great minds to understand Who Did It. The academic world festers while management dithers, diplomats dose, undertakers fib and businessmen diddle. The Pharos is shrouded in mist and the Pyramids lost in a sandstorm. A sinister wind blows up out of the desert, adding to the hot air even before the arsonist sets things alight. Fortunately a mad inventor is on hand – and Falco just happens to know how his most useful invention works...