Notebooks of Pliny the Younger Books in Order

A murder interrupts a caravan's journey through first-century Smyrna, leaving Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and a physician named Luke to investigate. With no Roman magistrate available, they question a varied group of suspects and examine secrets among the victim's slaves.

Emperor Domitian orders Pliny and Tacitus to investigate possible descendants of Augustus. A workman's death and its connection to Pliny's household complicate their assignment, bringing imperial suspicion, family histories, and politically dangerous loyalties into a single investigation.

Pliny discovers an apparently dead man while hunting, but cannot determine how he died. When the body vanishes from a locked stable, Tacitus joins an investigation complicated by strangers claiming kinship, assertions of immortality, and further suspicious deaths.

A friend asks Pliny to help her husband, who stands accused of murder in Naples and refuses to defend himself. Investigating with Tacitus forces Pliny to revisit the devastation of Vesuvius and painful memories surrounding his adoptive father's death.

Aurora helps a woman searching for her missing husband, drawing Pliny and Tacitus into the inquiry. Evidence of murder and an injury to Aurora make the case increasingly personal, while imperial attention threatens to force Pliny into an unwelcome alliance.

Building work at Pliny's Lake Como villa reveals a skeleton, prompting an investigation that attracts anonymous threats. His mishandling of Aurora's arranged marriage has already caused personal turmoil, and his wife's subsequent disappearance makes the danger harder to dismiss.

Heavy rains collapse a warehouse in which Pliny has invested, revealing several bodies and a surviving infant. One victim shows signs of murder rather than accidental death, drawing Pliny into a mystery involving aristocratic connections and dangerous political resentments.

Travelling with Tacitus toward Gaul, Pliny and Aurora become stranded by an avalanche in an Alpine village. The location recalls an earlier visit and an unexplained death, as renewed threats connect their present predicament with unfinished dangers from the past.