Poseidon's Gold

Marcus Didius Falco returns to Rome expecting a quiet homecoming and finds the opposite: his apartment occupied, his family name tangled in a dead soldier's scheme involving money owed from his brother Festus's time in the legions, and a client list that bottoms out at his own mother. When the soldier turns up stabbed, Falco is the prime suspect, his patrician girlfriend is arrested as an accomplice, and the only person who knows the truth is Geminus, the father who abandoned the family two decades earlier.

Simon Prebble makes Falco's sardonic first-person narration feel completely natural, delivering Lindsey Davis's humor and the Roman procedural atmosphere with equal authority. His timing on the novel's frequent wit is precise without interrupting narrative momentum, and the historical texture of Falco's world comes through in Prebble's measured, confident performance. At just over twelve hours, Poseidon's Gold rewards Prebble's investment in this long-running and distinctive series.