Roman Games

2 primary works

Roman Games:

by Bruce Macbain

Published 30 September 2010

Rome: September, 96 AD. When the body of Sextus Verpa, a notorious senatorial informer and libertine, is found stabbed to death in his bedroom, suspicion falls on his household slaves - a potential death sentence for all. The cruel emperor, Domitian, orders Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus - known to history as Pliny the Younger - to investigate. However, the Ludi Romani (the Roman Games) have just begun, and for the next fifteen days the law courts are in recess. If Pliny can't identify the murderer in that time, Verpa's entire slave household will be burned alive in the arena. Pliny teams up with Martial, a starving author of bawdy verses and hanger - on to the city's glitterati. Pooling their respective talents, they unravel a plot that involves Jewish and Christian "atheists," exotic Egyptian cultists, Rome's own pantheon of gods, and a missing horoscope that forecasts the emperor's death...

The Bull Slayer

by Bruce Macbain

Published 5 March 2013

THE ROMAN EMPIRE, 109 AD

The frontier province of Bithynia is a cesspit of sedition, rotten with corruption and seething with hatred of Rome. When a rich Roman official is found dead on a desolate hillside; two riderless horses tethered in a nearby wood, it is assumed he was killed as a protest against Emperor Trajan's unlimited power.

But Pliny the Younger, newly appointed Governor of Bithynia, is not so sure.

Who was the other rider? What were the two of them doing in the middle of nowhere? And what links this murder to a secret cult of the Persian sun god, Mithras – the Bull Slayer?