Lord Chamberlain John spends his days counseling Emperor Justinian and passes the small hours of night in conversation with the solemn-eyed little girl depicted in a mosaic on his study wall. He never expected to meet her in a public square or afterwards find her red-dyed corpse in a subterranean cistern. Had the mysterious woman truly been the model for the mosaic years before as she claimed? Why had she sought John out? Who wanted her dead - and...

It's 539 AD, and John the Lord Chamberlain finds his investigations hampered by squabbling courtiers, servants with social ambitions, an eccentric host, and an egotistic inventor - not to mention a herd of prophesying goats and a protective whale. The Mithran Anatolius and the excubitor captain Felix only add to John's worries when they fall under the spell of two ambitious women. Can the trio avoid Theodora's wrath as they work to protect a child...

It's unnaturally cold in Constantinople this winter of 525. The Emperor Justin is dying, and Theodora, the ambitious former actress his gravely ill successor Justinian intends to marry, is making demands in the imperial court. When a wealthy philanthropist is killed in broad daylight in the Great Church, it isn't entirely surprising that Justinian engages an anonymous young slave called John to investigate what many believe could be a conspiracy aimed...

John the Eunuch, Lord Chamberlain to the Emperor Justinian, is skilled at keeping his footing on the treacherous slopes of court intrigue, but even he may slip when presented with a new and byzantine problem: why would a holy man high atop his pillar spontaneously combust during a thunder storm? Soon, other stylites burn to their deaths. John, still fresh from working a tricky murder case two years earlier in One for Sorrow, finds that his investigations...