Has Yarbro written very similar novels about Saint- Germain? Yes, she has. Yet I continue to read them and she continues to write them. Saint-Germain is forever the exile, always helping people with the medicine he has learned in his very, very long life, the money he has learned to acquire either in shipping or as an alchemist, actually making gold and jewels. He is a good man. He is more human, for all that he would disagree with that assessment, than most of his fellow people. I care about his adventures. I care that he "lives."

This book is set in Rome in the third century, called the Decadence. The child- emperor Heliogabalus diverts the Roman people with circuses and sibarytic parties. While his tax collectors rob the populace blind -- or try to in Sanctus- Franciscus' case. Meanwhile, factions of Christians are jockeying for control. (I would have preferred to hear about Peterine groups instead of Paulists. Paulists I recognize, Peterines would have been new to me.) There is a tax collector and a Paulist who are out to get Sanctus- Franciscus. There is also a woman dying from lead poisoning who he attempts to help -- and she is massively unlikeable. Was she horrible before lead poisoning or did it make her a harridan? Was there a before lead poisoning for her-- she talks about it as a disease in her family... I really like reading history through Saint- Germain's lens. ( )