The ninth installment in the Roma Sub Rosa series (that is, "a secret history of Rome") is a fresh and lively adventure for Gordianus the Finder, who by this point in the series is middle aged, semi-retired, and facing two catastrophic developments in his personal life — a growing personal debt and the failing health of his beloved wife.

Set on the eve of Caesar's triumph over Pompey, as uncertainty and economic chaos trouble the Capitol of the Ancient World, A Mist of Prophecies only tangentially concerns the military adventures of Rome's two would-be rulers. Instead, the central story focuses on the city's powerful women, and the question of which one among them would have resorted to murder to remove a mysterious, possibly mad seeress called Cassandra.

Initial reservations about the plot (Cassandra?!) soon give way to admiration for Saylor's cleverness and the economical, sympathetic way in which he paints Gordianus. Lonely and troubled, worried about his wife and plagued by money problems, Gordianus is facing a midlife crisis just as Rome itself is passing through a similarly portentious moment of change — crumbling from Republic into Empire, and all the madness and suffering which Empire will bring. It's a scary place to be, but it's sweetened by a powerful fascination, shared by Gordianus and the great city of Rome alike, with the exotic Cassandra, a foreigner who appears in the forum one day and casts an eerie, but irresistible, spell over the city's ruling class. Who is she? How has she come to Rome? And most importantly, can she truly see the future? As Caesar and Pompey vie for control of the known world, Cassandra's visions elucidate, uplift, and terrify. For the elite, she is both a valuable asset and an intolerable threat. For Gordianus, she is a breath of youth rekindled. But for someone — it's up to Gordianus to uncover who — she is a target: when Cassandra collapses in the marketplace, to die in Gordianus' arms, the Finder comes out of retirement to see to it that justice is served. Nine of Rome's most powerful women — the wives of Caesar and Pompey, and the daughter of the late dictator Sulla among them — head the list of suspects. But who gave the prophetess the poisoned cup, and why?

Entwined with the mystery of the seeress' murder is the deeply personal, equally secret history Gordianus shared with her. Saylor has structured his story along two time-lines: the current investigation, which takes Gordianus into the finest of Rome's drawing rooms in a time when even the wealthy are losing their luster, and a series of flashbacks which detail the Finder's blossoming relationship with the lovely and secretive young woman, and which moves the backstory through a period of some months. Saylor is thus able to explore Rome's tumultuous state over a large span of time in a swift, economical manner, and as always it is the political situation — forever fascinating, and often dangerous — that informs the affair of Cassandra's notoriety and untimely death, and Gordianus' concurrent personal difficulties.

On both a historical and fictive level, the book is gripping, frightening, elucidating — everything Saylor's earlier fiction has led the reader to expect from him. It is also a tender story of love and of the need to recapture youth as later life approaches — a diabolical cliché in lesser hands, but served here with a realism and gravity that makes the love part of the equation even more captivating than Saylor's brand of character-driven mystery and political mayhem. Gordianus may already be in his middle years, but the series — and Saylor's inventiveness — have yet to show a trace of wear.