Ashley Gardner

Cavalry captain Gabriel Lacey returns to Regency London from the Napoleonic wars, burned out, fighting melancholia, his career ended....

In June, 1820, I travel to Lyon to attend a wedding, looking forward to sunny strolls on the city’s two rivers and sampling the region’s food. Instead, I soon spy a man from my past who stirs painful and enraging memories.

Leonidas is coerced into a dice game at his local popina, with a stranger who turns out to not be such a stranger after all. His presence puts all around him in danger, and Leonidas struggles to keep the man’s identity secret....

When I agree to visit Grenville in his villa near Rome, I scarcely imagine that I immediately will become embroiled in mystery and mayhem. James Denis has requested that I purchase an antique from a collector, one Conte de Luca....

AD 63. Leonidas’s former trainer, Aemil, asks him to look into the disappearances of gladiators from his ludus. Leonidas and Cassia investigate, and soon uncover gruesome murders involving some of the wealthiest citizens of Rome....