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A Novel of the Roman Empire
Bloomsbury Publishing
March 2007
On Sale: March 6, 2007
400 pages ISBN: 1596912316 EAN: 9781596912311 Hardcover
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Fiction
Gaius Petrius Ruso is a divorced and down-on his luck army
doctor who has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in
an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia.
His arrival in Deva (more commonly known as Chester,
England) does little to improve his mood, and after a
straight thirty six hour shift at the army hospital, he
succumbs to a moment of weakness and rescues an injured
slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner.
Now he has a new problem: a slave who won’t talk and can’t
cook, and drags trouble in her wake. Before he knows it,
Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the
deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. A few
years earlier, after he rescued Emperor Trajan from an
earthquake in Antioch, Ruso seemed headed for glory: now
he’s living among heathens in a vermin-infested bachelor pad
and must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer
who may be after him next.
Who are the true barbarians, the conquered or the
conquerors? It’s up to Ruso—certainly the most likeable
sleuth to come out of the Roman Empire—to discover the
truth. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail,
Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and
real as our own.
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