Paul Doherty visits the Roman Empire, and chooses a time shortly after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when Constantine, under his Romano-British mother's influence, flew the Cross of Christ as his standard and, having established himself in Rome as Emperor of the West, put a stop to the persecution of Christians and allowed Christianity at last to flourish and grow.
Flourish and grow it did, as that mother, Helen, bearing the title Empress, effectively ran the empire and showed favour to Christian leaders: within a few years it had become the state religion.
Now, though, in AD 314, many if not most people are still not even nominally Christian; gladiatorial games are still held in the Colosseum, and a champion gladiator, Murranus, is the hero of this story. Or at any rate, the heroine's sports-star boyfriend, for the real hero is one-time actress Claudia, now special agent and investigator to the Empress. It is she who must investigate when the sons and daughters of the super-rich are being kidnapped and held to ransom, and when a series of veteran soldiers are brutally murdered. Is there any connection? What do the soldiers have in common? She discovers that they all took part in a massacre of Picts at a fort on Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain, and the torture and slaughter of the Pictish chieftain and his young son. That was eighteen years ago, but survivors have long memories ...
A great story set very plausibly in a period of tumult and change and filled with colourful and unforgettable characters not least of whom is "the queen of the night", a beautiful deaf-mute ex-prostitute, Cassia, and her companion Laertus, the effeminate eunuch who shares a sign language with her and communicates with others on her behalf. But was Cassia, once, "the Golden Maid"? I think I must have skipped something somewhere there. Certainly she should have been and perhaps we are meant to read between the lines.
Don't miss this one. And if you are strictly a reader of medieval mysteries, remember that it was this Constantine (who was proclaimed Emperor in his mother's city of York in England you can see a statue of him there outside medieval York Minster) who later founded the city of Constantinople (in modern Turkey) and thereby in effect inaugurated the medieval period, at least in the east.
JM
