Part 1: The Book of Julian Rome , in the year of our Lord 380 AD: Flavius Pictor leads a tranquil life with his young wife Lucia in still unconquered Rome. He is a historian and is writing his books about the Emperor Julian, whom the Christians call the Apostata, the apostate, because seventeen years earlier he had tried to make the old gods the only true faith in the Empire again. Flavius had been present when the emperor fell in the campaign against the Persians, allegedly murdered by one of his own bodyguards, who had been a Christian. The tranquillity of his life is over for Flavius when a series of murders shakes Rome to its foundations. One after the other, the high priests of the old seven state gods of Rome are killed, each in a different way. Crucified, burned, torn apart by lions, the very ways that were once used on Christians. Flavius' father-in-law, Marcus, is entrusted with the investigation of the series of murders as the aedile of this year and draws the astute Flavius ever deeper into it. Flavius does not yet suspect that his books about the dead emperor and the murders of the state priests are connected.