Falco is back from North Africa, with new-found respectability and a dead brother-in-law to cope with. Appointed to a post in the religious hierarchy--keeper of the city's sacred geese--Davis's imperial Roman sleuth soon finds himself caught up in the murder of a member of one of the sacred brotherhoods and the disappearance of the most likely new candidate for the order of vestal virgins. His wife's brother tripped over the first of these and he himself was approached … mehrby the virgin, a small, frighteningly upper-class girl, and asked to help with her fears that one of her family meant her harm. Davis's command of the complexities of Roman society and attitudes has rarely been so impressively on display; Falco's world moves between the comic, the tragic and the horrid without missing a beat, or a trick. The portrait of the Emperor Vespasian that has intermittently grown up in the background of these excellent historical thrillers acquires more areas of light and shadow, and the love story of the low-rent public informer Falco and his aristocratic wife Julia becomes more touching. Davis's book Two For the Lions won the Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger for historical thrillers. --Roz Kaveney weniger