A Roman official's daughter is kidnapped, ostensibly by the disgraced Christians. As the young philosopher who loves her desperately tries to find and rescue her, he encounters treacherous friends and unlikely allies and learns more than he cares to about the despised Roman Christians.This is a mystery, but not a murder mystery. Hambly excels at re-creating the ambience and attitudes of ancient Rome. I didn't like the endless denigratory comments about Christians, but they were probably authentic to the time, as was the infighting. The story itself was fairly predictable, but the lively characters (mostly) kept the plotline moving along. Apparently the Kindle version was scanned and inadequately corrected, as there are a number of typical OCR errors: italicization for no reason, "mere" instead of "there."