Steven Saylor’s Latest Now on Sale
The tenth novel in Steven Saylor’s series of adventures of Gordianus the Finder hits shelves today.
Saylor, whose works of erotic gay fiction under the pen name Aaron Travis are re-emerging in gay bookstores and have been included in some of the best collections of queer erotica, began his "Roma Sub Rosa" series in 1990 with the publication of the surprise best-seller Roman Blood.
In the inaugural novel, Gordianus the Finder--an ancient Roman version of a private detective--looked into a murder case for Cicero, an unknown about to become a sensation in Roman society. Building his story of political and sexual intrigue around actual historical events, Saylor created a riveting novel that brought the ancient world whole cloth before a modern audience.
More installments in the series have followed, including ten novels and two volumes of collected short stories. Every book showcases Saylor’s impeccable research and his talent for painting vivid narrative portraits of life as the Romans lived it, all while telling cleverly constructed tales of mystery and murder.
The twelfth volume in the series, The Triumph of Caesar, finds Gordianus looking into who killed a close friend and what that friend might have known about a plot Caesar’s wife Calpurnia suspects may be afoot to assassinate the great Roman general on the eve of his assumption of dictatorial power. As Caesar’s four great triumphal celebrations follow one after the next in the greatest celebration Rome has ever witnessed, Gordianus crisscrosses the city’s streets and byways, from the estates of the exalted, to grim back alleys, to the dungeons of condemned foreign captives, looking to decode his murdered friend’s final journal entries and prevent Caesar’s triumphal jubilee from ending in a State funeral--and a possible civil war.
The Triumph of Caesar is published by St. Martin’s Minotaur in hardcover. 311 pages; $24.95.
