John the Eunuch Mystery
5 total works
Gang-plagued streets, politicians plotting each other's downfall, poverty and homelessness existing side-by-side with manifest wealth-no, this isn't modern day Washington D.C., but rather 6th-Century Constantinople. After a philanthropist is murdered in the city's Great Church, where he's gone too visit a controversial statue of Christ, John the Eunuch, Lord Chamberlin to Byzantine Emperor Justinian the First, is assigned to ferret out the killer and maybe also to act the role of a spy in a web of rivalries involving the current and future emperors.
The year is 542. Peter, John the Lord Chamberlain's elderly servant, claims a heavenly visitor revealed a murder to him. It transpires that Peter's old army friend has indeed been stabbed, but then John discovers that Gregory was not what he appeared to be. Is the solution to the mystery to be found in a hidden identity, in the will made by a dying ship owner with a wayward son, or perhaps even amid the oracles in a merchant's garden? John's quest leads him to churchmen and whores, lawyers and bear trainers. Suspects include and bear trainers. Suspects include a dealer in dubious antiquities, a resourceful bookseller, a court poet fixated on bereavement, and a holy fool who outrages the city by dancing with the dead and invading the empress' private bath. Only a man of unbending principle could hope to find justice in a terrified city where the good and the bad are struck down indiscriminately, where disorder rules, and where witnesses may die before they can be questioned. A city, in short, where death is the murderer's accomplice.
