Pope John XII has spent seven years asking God a single question. Tonight he asks it for the twenty-fifth time.
In the year 963, the Vicar of Christ takes a blacksmith’s wife from a forge in the Suburra and brings her to the Tower of Silence. The blacksmith, Giorgio, is left for dead in the mud beside the papal seal — a calling card for whoever cares to come.
Lukas von Mainz is the German envoy sent to negotiate with the most depraved papacy in Christendom. When he finds Giorgio still breathing, he is offered a wager: seventy-two hours to reach the woman before the Pope finishes what he began. Beneath them runs the Cloaca Maxima, a Roman sewer the Church has tried to forget. Inside the Lateran, a half-blind scribe has spent eighteen years writing down the names of the disappeared. And above them all stands the Tower, and the man who has staked his soul on the silence of God.
Three days. One hammer. The truth about the Papacy that Otto I will pay any price to bury — and one diplomat who will pay it.
The silence is not the absence of an answer. The silence is the answer.
For readers of Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires, Robert Harris’s Conclave, and Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar.
A literary thriller of 10th-century Rome. Dark. Historically grounded. The first book in the Lukas Von Mainz Thrillers.
