Gary Corby Volgorde van de boeken (chronologisch)

Greece, 545 BC: The sacred isle of Delos was the birthplace of the divine twins Apollo and Artemis, and has been a most holy pilgrimage site for centuries. But now it also serves a more secular function it is the home of the treasury of the Delian League, the defensive union of Greek city-states who have come together in wake of the Persian Wars. The treasury is a vast fund, and it is protected only by the priests and priestesses of the tiny isle and a scant armed guard. Now Pericles, the charismatic Athenian statesman, has sent his agent Nico to Delos on a dangerous (and possibly illegal) mission: to claim the treasury and bring it back to Athens, where Pericles thinks it will be safer. Nico travels with his heavily pregnant wife and partner in sleuthing, the priestess Diotima, who has been selected to give this year s annual offering to Artemis. Expecting righteous resistance, Pericles has also tasked Nico with bribing priests who try to prevent the treasury from being moved. But before he can get very far with this dubiously unholy task, Nico ends up with a murder on his hands. It is a crime against the gods to die or be born on the sacred island. Thanks to the violence over the treasury, the first blasphemy has already been committed. Can Nico solve the murder and get Diotima off the island before they accidentally commit the second?"

And to solve the crime, Nico must uncover a secret that could not only destroy Athens, but will force him to choose between love, ambition, and his own life. The case takes Nico, in the company of a beautiful slave girl, to the land of Ionia within the Persian Empire. The Persians will execute him on the spot if they think he's a spy. Beyond that, there are only a few minor problems: He's being chased by brigands who are only waiting for the right price before they kill him; somehow he has to placate his girlfriend, who is very angry about that slave girl; he must meet Themistocles, the military genius who saved Greece during the Persian Wars, and then defected to the hated enemy. Athens, 460 B.C. Life's tough for Nicolaos, the only investigating agent in ancient Athens. His girlfriend's left him and his boss wants to fire him. But when an Athenian official is murdered, the brilliant statesman Pericles has no choice but to put Nico on the job.

Athens, 461 BC: A clever young man named Nicolaos has been hired by the politician Pericles to find and expose an assassin. Ephialtes, the statesman who brought democracy to Athens, has been murdered, and the city is in an uproar. It looks as if someone is attempting to stifle the world’s first democracy in its infancy. Now, Nico walks the mean streets of Classical Athens in search of the killer with the irritating help of his precocious twelve-year-old brother, Socrates. The increasing number of dead witnesses doesn’t make his job any easier. Meanwhile, Nico juggles other pressing concerns—like getting closer (much closer) to Diotima, the intelligent and annoyingly virgin priestess of Artemis. Can he discover a killer and save Athenian democracy without getting on the wrong side of the gods or the city guard?