Steven Saylor Books in Order

The final Rome novel continues the Pinarius saga from the high point of Marcus Aurelius's reign through plagues, barbarian invasions, military coups, and the rise of Christianity, ending with Constantine and a city, and faith, transformed.

Set in March 44 BC, this novel follows Gordianus as he helps manage the ceremonies around Caesar's latest honors, hears rumors of knives in the Senate, and watches the Ides of March unfold from an uncomfortably close vantage point.

In 88 BC, Gordianus travels to Ephesus to rescue his old tutor Antipater from King Mithridates's court, only to uncover a plan to massacre Roman citizens across Asia Minor and a ritual murder meant to win the Furies' favor.

Now living in Alexandria, young Gordianus is forced into the criminal underworld when Bethesda is kidnapped, joining a gang plotting to steal Alexander the Great's sarcophagus while Egypt's rival kings and Roman politics make every move more dangerous.

This slim volume gathers three autobiographical essays and a short story in which Saylor writes candidly about his mother's death, his Texas boyhood, and building a life and marriage with another man.

A trio of standalone tales moves from a near future nightmare about pest control, to contemporary Berkeley suspense, to an ancient hunt after the fall of Carthage, linked by questions of cruelty, survival, and what people will do under pressure.

Collecting essays written over two decades, A Bookish Bent ranges from interviews and reviews to pieces on Agatha Christie, Roman history, and the origins of Gordianus, offering a relaxed tour through the reading life that shaped Saylor's fiction.

Eighteen-year-old Gordianus sets off with his tutor Antipater to see the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and at each stop he faces a fresh puzzle, learning both the pleasures and dangers of investigation far from home.

In Empire, successive generations of the Pinarius family serve and survive emperors from Augustus to Hadrian, enduring court intrigues, volcanic eruptions, persecutions, and rebuilding after disasters while trying to keep their honor and line intact.

Back from Egypt and hoping to retire, Gordianus is asked by Caesar's wife Calpurnia to investigate rumors of a plot against the dictator during his lavish triumphs, starting with the suspicious death of a previous investigator on her doorstep.

Following intertwined branches of the Potitius and Pinarius families, Roma sweeps from the swampy trading post on the Tiber through kings, early wars, Hannibal's threat, and the fall of the Republic, showing how one small settlement becomes a world power.

These eleven stories fill in Gordianus's early career, from jealous consuls and stolen garum recipes to missing gladiators and paranoid generals, offering compact mysteries that illuminate Roman life between the first novels and Catilina's Riddle.

Traveling to Egypt to seek a cure for his gravely ill wife Bethesda, Gordianus finds himself amid the power struggle between Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra and entangled in Caesar's pursuit of Pompey, where one misstep could doom his family.

Returning from San Francisco to her sleepy hometown of Amethyst, Texas, Rue Dunwitty arrives just as a teenage girl vanishes, and her search for answers stirs up old family land, small town grudges, and a very present danger.

When a mysterious seeress called Cassandra collapses poisoned in Gordianus's arms, he traces her connections to seven powerful Roman women as Caesar and Pompey fight abroad, uncovering a web of prophecy, espionage, and personal betrayal inside the city.

Hearing that his son Meto has died a traitor, Gordianus slips through Caesar's siege lines into starving Massilia, where the fall of a young woman from Sacrifice Rock and a city's divided loyalties complicate his search for the truth.

In 1880s Austin, Texas, young writer Will Porter, later known as O. Henry, is drawn into a series of brutal axe murders that terrorize the city, and decades later blackmail forces him to confront what really happened.

On the eve of Caesar's civil war, a murdered envoy appears in Gordianus's garden with a secret message, dragging the Finder into treasonous plots, hard choices about his son Meto, and the question of which side of history he can live with.

This collection of linked stories follows a younger Gordianus between 90 and 72 BC, showing how he acquired his household, his patrons, and his reputation while solving mysteries that stretch from Rome's forums to far flung corners of the Republic.

After the populist firebrand Clodius is cut down on the Appian Way, Rome erupts in riots, and Gordianus is hired to reconstruct the ambush, sift rival eyewitness accounts, and decide whether justice is possible in a city tearing itself apart.

When Egyptian philosopher Dio is murdered after seeking his protection, Gordianus must pick his way through the salons and scandals of Clodia, Catullus, and Marcus Caelius to learn who really wanted the diplomat dead and why.

Hoping to retire quietly to a farm in Etruria, Gordianus is pushed by Cicero into hosting the notorious senator Catilina, then confronted with a headless corpse and whispers of rebellion that could shatter the fragile Roman Republic.

Summoned to Marcus Crassus's seaside villa after an overseer is found butchered, Gordianus has three days to prove two runaway slaves innocent or see every slave on the estate executed under ancient law, even as Spartacus's revolt looms.

Young sleuth Gordianus the Finder is hired by an unknown advocate named Cicero to investigate a patricide case in 80 BC, pulling him from Rome's alleys into a deadly conspiracy involving Sulla's dictatorship and powerful landowners.