'Uh...Dad?' Young Lucius's face was chalk white. 'Dad, I think he's dead.' It took a moment to register. Then Renatius dropped the towel and was through the door in five seconds flat, and the rest of the wineshop, including me, were about two seconds behind him. When Pegasus, racing mega-star and lead driver of the Whites faction, is found stabbed to death in the alleyway beside Renatius's wineshop, Marcus Corvinus is already on site. The local District Watch - crooked to a man - claim that the killer's motive was simple theft, but Corvinus knows it wasn't. Tracking the murderer down, with...

When the solid gold statue of a female baker gifted to the oracle at Delphi by King Croesus of Lydia and missing for over three centuries unexpectedly reappears on the Athenian black market, Corvinus's stepfather Helvius Priscus recruits him as go-between in the purchase. Priscus, though, it turns out, isn't the only interested party, and where bidding methods are concerned his rivals don't play games... The fourth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

'Right, ' I said. 'So what can I do for the Chief Vestal, pal?' The Axeman was flexing his hands like he was squeezing a couple of these wooden balls wrestlers use to strengthen their grip. 'I'm to take you to the Galba place, ' he said. 'There's been a death.' 'Fine, ' I said. 'You care to tell me whose?' 'One of the Ladies.' Shit. I sat back. One of the Ladies, eh? For Torquata's Axeman that could mean only one thing. The dead woman was a Vestal. Asked to investigate the death of a young woman during the closed-door rites of the Good Goddess, Corvinus knows he is on very sensitive ground....