"The highest praise I can offer this wonderfully entertaining portrait of the Roman Empire at its most far-flung is that I hope Downie is planning a series. Ruso is too good a character for just one book."—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

Divorced and down on his luck, Gaius Petreius Ruso has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia. In a moment of weakness, after a straight thirtysix-hour shift at the army hospital, he succumbs to compassion and rescues an injured slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner.

Now he has a new problem: a slave who won't talk and can't cook, and drags trouble in her wake. Before he knows it, Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. Now Ruso must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer who may be after him next.

With a gift for comic timing and historical detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own.

Visit Ruth's blog.

In 2004, Ruth Downie won the Fay Weldon section of BBC3's End of Story competition. Books in this trilogy include Medicus, Terra Incognita, and this, the forthcoming Persona Non Grata.

More about the author:

I was born in Ilfracombe, in beautiful North Devon. Some people know from a very early age that they are going to be writers: I wasn’t one of them. I fear this will upset some readers, but I left university with an English degree and no greater ambition than to get married and live happily ever after. Perhaps it was all that Jane Austen.

Even in those days, being a wife was not actually a full-time career. Some of my earliest ventures into creative writing were attempts to type up my indecipherable shorthand in such a way that the boss wouldn’t suspect that he hadn’t really said it. As secretaries were replaced with computers, and my higher-flying contemporaries discovered to their horror that they were expected to type their own letters, there were fewer and fewer outlets for creativity in the office. Finally I took the plunge and started writing my own stuff.

At this point I was lucky enough to be working for a company that needed scripts written, and they were brave enough to give the office staff a shot at doing it. (They once needed kitchen appliances scavenged from the local tip to use on a film shoot, and kindly gave us the chance to do that, too.) Thanks, Pace Productions!

I am currently proud to be living in Milton Keynes. (Milton Keynes, for non-UK readers, was created as a new town in the 1970’s and only the ignorant make jokes about it). I have a husband, two grown-up sons, a cat, and a garden with potential. My time is divided between writing the Ruso novels, thinking I should be writing the Ruso novels, and the occasional week spent grovelling in mud with an archaeological trowel.