It’s good to be back in (ancient) Rome.  Marcus Didius Falco and Helena Justina, accompanied by a Celt as a bodyguard, have returned to Rome from Germany. It’s late, it’s raining, and they are desperately tired, but Falco’s old quarters have been overrun by squatters and so they stumble on to Falco’s mother’s place. But there too they find a stranger, a fellow legionnaire of Falco’s dead brother Festus who has his muddy boots up on the kitchen table as if he owns the place. The man has a grievance, over money he says is owed him from a get-rich-quick scheme of Festus’s that tanked, but which he insists Festus promised to make good on before he died. The problem is, no one seems to know what the legionnaire is talking about. Falco’s mother insists that Falco clear up the mystery and his brother’s good name, a task that takes on added urgency when Falco finds himself charged with the legionnaire’s ghastly murder. Solving the mystery takes us into the world of art collectors and art dealers, Falco’s dead-beat dad (as Falco thinks of him) being one of the latter. Father and son team up to solve the art-scam-murder. It’s a clever, funny, and surprisingly tender story.