When Gordianus hesitates, he finds on his land an omen that uncannily seems to echo a riddle of Catilina's about a head on a shrunken body and a body without a head: an anonymous, decapitated corpse. But Cicero, whose brilliant legal defense of Gordianus' claim won him the farm, wants to collect on the favor and sends his protege Marcus Caelius, who's wormed his way as a spy into the confidence of Cicero's powerful adversary Lucius Sergius Catilina, to ask Gordianus to make the farm available to Catilina as a retreat so that he too can report back to his wily old employer. Retired to an Etruscan farm left him by his benefactor Lucius Claudius, Gordianus already has his hands full with Lucius' surviving relatives-neighboring landowners contemptuous of Gordianus and covetous of the farm they regard as rightfully theirs. Gordianus the Finder-legman and sleuth for the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero in Roman Blood (1991) and Arms of Nemesis (1992)-gets swept up in the epochal Catiline conspiracy in this ambitious crossover novel.
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