John Maddox Roberts: The Sacrilege (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger has been enjoying an easy exile on Rhodes, banished by his family for his incorrigible trouble-making. But he is recalled to Rome when they suddenly have a need for his peculiar skills. Metellus Celer, head of a politically powerful family, has been poisoned, and the most likely candidate for the deed is his infamous wife, Clodia. A simple case of a wife disposing of an incovenient husband. It happens every day. But nothing is ever simple about murder among Rome's ruling classes. Poisoning is more serious than, say, stabbing or strangulation. Poisoning involves the laws against witchcraft. There is a secret, forbidden cult of the old Earth gods that flourishes right alongside the official State cult of the Olympians, and Decius discovers that some very highborn people are involved in it. A trial of Coldia for poisoning could embarrass some of Rome's most important families.

And there is a further complication. Decius thinks Clodia is innocent (of this particular murder, anyway) and is forced into an uneasy alliance with her brother, Clodius, darling of the plebs and his sworn enemy. Life is never simple for the servant of the Senate and People of Rome.

John Maddox Roberts: The Sacrilege. SPQR III. Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin's Minotaur, ISBN: 0312246978 (October, 1999), 245 p., $13.95.

John Maddox Roberts: The Sacrilege (USA 1992)

From the Publisher:
"CAESAR'S WIFE MUST BE ABOVE SUSPICION!"
So decrees Caius Julius Caesar himself - Rome's pontifex maximus, guardian of religious procedure. But scandal rocks the Imperial City when a sacred women's rite presided over by Caesar's spouse, Pompeia, is infiltrated by a corrupt patrician dressed in female garb.

Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, fledgling senator and experienced detector of crime, senses a connection between the sacrilege and four bizarre murders that follow. And with the aid of a notorious criminal, he will trail the bloody perpetrators from the lowest depths of the crime-ridden Subura district to the highest echelons of the Roman elite-creating powerful enemies along the way who are determined to terminate both the investigation...and the investigator.

"All the wild imaginative stimulation of the best detective fiction... I had a wonderful time." - Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of »The Mists of Avalon«

John Maddox Roberts: The Sacrilege. He who observes Rome's most secret ritual... must die. An SPQR Mystery. Avon Books, ISBN: 0380766272 (May, 1992), 216 p., $4.50.