In this "absolutely electrifying" (Jeffrey Deaver) thriller and huge international hit, two people—each shattered by their past—team up to solve a series of killings and abductions that may hint at something far more sinister at play.
When a woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome and her six-year-old son goes missing, the police see an easy solution: they arrest the woman's husband and await his confession. But the chief of Rome's...

"In first century Rome, Flavia Albia, the daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, has taken up her father's former profession as an informer. On a typical day, it's small cases cheating spouses, employees dipping into the till but this isn't a typical day. Her beloved, the plebeian Manlius Faustus, has recently moved in and decided that they should get married in a big, showy ceremony as part of beginning a proper domestic life together. Also, his contracting...

"The story begins with a hand curled around another man's throat. This is Roman justice: Emperor Tiberius first dispatches a traitor--a friend he once trusted with the city--then the man's whole family and all of his friends. It is as if he never existed. Into this fevered forum, a child is born. His mother is Agrippina, granddaughter of Emperor Augustus. But their imperial blood is neither balm nor protection. Rather, it is a liability. Blood is...

A pigeon carrying an important message takes the reader on a unique tour which includes both ancient and modern parts of the city of Rome.

Suburra takes a deep dive into a politically and financially corrupt contemporary Italy, where a mighty local crime family, the Mafia, corrupt politicians, and new rabid criminal elements battle each other for control of a glittering prize--control over a multibillion dollar development twenty miles from the Italian capital. During the final days of Silvio Berlusconi's reign, a massive development proposal that will turn the depressed coastal settlement...

"Whispered secrets about her parents' past take on new urgency for Chariline as she pays one last visit to the land of her forefathers, the ancient kingdom of Cush. Raised as an orphan by her aunt, Chariline has only been told a few pieces of her parents' tragic love story. Her beautiful dark skin is proof that her father was Cushite, but she knows nothing else. While visiting her grandfather before his retirement as the Roman official in the queen's...

Rome, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco is deperate to leave the notorious Lautumiae prison - though being bailed out by his mother is a slight indignity...
Things go from bad to worse though when a group of nouveau riche ex-slaves hire him to outwit a fortune-hunting redhead, whose husbands have a habit of dying accidently, leaving him up against a female contortionist, her extra-friendly snake, indigestible cakes and rent racketeers. And,

...

"When Amelia Tate is cast to play the Audrey Hepburn role in a remake of Roman Holiday, she feels as if all her dreams have come true. She has a handsome boyfriend, is portraying her idol in a major motion picture, and gets to live in beautiful, Italian city of Rome for the next two months. Once there, she befriends a young woman named Sophie with whom she begins to explore the city. Together, they discover all the amazing riches that Rome has to...

"Pompeii was a lively resort flourishing in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius at the height of the Roman Empire. When Vesuvius erupted in an explosion of flame and ash, the entire town would be destroyed. Some of its citizens died in the chaos, some escaped the mountain's wrath ... and these are their stories"--

"In the sacred grove of Julius Caesar, something deadly stirs in the undergrowth-a serial killer, who haunted the gardens for years, has claimed another victim-in Lindsey Davis's next historical mystery, The Grove of the Caesars. At the feet of her adoptive father, renowned private informer Marcus Didius Falco, Flavia Albia learned a number of important rules. First and foremost-always keep one's distance from the palace, nothing good comes from that...