The Deceivers

by Bill Page

Roman Britain: Late Autumn AD 370

Summoning Canio to his Villa Censorini (Chedworth, Gloucestershire), Caristanius Sabinus, governor of Britannia Prima, informs him that he has been ordered to find a certain ancient figurine of the Underworld goddess Hecate, which he has reason to believe is in Canio’s possession.

Canio denies that he has it, or that he ever had it – which is half-true. But Sabinus doesn’t believe him, and Canio is vulnerable to blackmail.

And so, accompanied by a strange woman called Bodicca and a motherless boy calling himself Maximus, he journeys through a land slowly descending into winter, seeking a replica figurine good enough to deceive Sabinus.

It may not end well.

Author news

See Carla Nayland's 23rd July 2011 review of The Sower of the Seeds of Dreams, and also her review of its prequel, The Moon on the Hills, 20th April 2010.

http://www.carlanayland.blogspot.com
or http://www.carlanayland.org

http://www.billpageauthor.co.uk

Book Reviews

Be the first to review this book

About the Author

Bill Page

I have lived most of my life in South Worcestershire, within sight of the northern end of the Cotswolds, that line of distant blue hills of my childhood.

Later, in my teens, I would cycle the long miles south and climb the steep and narrow lanes that wound up to the undulating plateau of the hills.

With the help of a tattered old one inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map I travelled the lonely byways (as they were then), searching out the sites of Roman villas and settlements, and also the Neolithic barrows which must themselves have been familiar landmarks in Roman times.

And always it was the Fourth Century, that final century of Roman Britain, which particularly fascinated me, its air of elegiac mystery permeating those Cotswold landscapes.