Plot Summary
Falco's closest friend, Petronius Longus, has finally caught one of the leading criminals in Rome, Balbinus Pius. But a quirk in Roman law allows a convicted felon, even a murderer, time to depart before the sentence is carried out. Balbinus' departure has left a vacuum in the underworld of Rome, and there is a crowd of criminals trying desperately to fill the void. Their first step is to engineer a robbery that reverberates throughout the city.
Falco is again called upon by the Emperor Vespasian to supply answers, as quietly and quickly as possible. A couple of murders, a kidnapping or two, and more suspects than Falco cares to count takes him, and his patrician girlfriend Helena Justina, to places a family shouldn't have to go.
Read more about this topic: Time To Depart
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)