The Fire of Rome

From the bestselling author of the Boudica novels, The Fire of Rome is a gripping race-against-time historical adventure in the bestselling tradition of Robert Harris’s Pompeii.

AD 34: Sebastos Pantera is twelve. Training for the time when he too will be a soldier of Rome, he follows his father to a garden tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem where he watches him greet two men and a heavily pregnant woman. In a moment that changes his life forever, he sees a wounded revolutionary being brought out of the tomb alive . . .

Twenty years later, Pantera returns from five years undercover in Britannia as assassin and spy for the Legions. He is sick of spying, but a deadly combination of old loyalties and a sense of unfinished business combine to lure him homeward to the city of Rome where, his former mentor and spymaster, the Machiavellian Seneca the Younger, charges him with rooting out the revolutionaries responsible for the city’s seething unrest. Pantera discovers that the main troublemaker is none other than his closest friend, Saulos, a recent convert to the new religion of Christianity, and Saulos is planning the biggest single act of terrorism the Roman Empire has known.

Spying, forbidden secrets, an ancient manuscript and an apocalyptic fire combine in a gripping thriller that will change the way we think about the ancient world.

Manda Scott’s first novel Hen’s Teeth was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.