The Veiled Assassin A Novel of the Late Roman Empire Embers of Empire Book 1 eBook Q V Hunter
Download As PDF : The Veiled Assassin A Novel of the Late Roman Empire Embers of Empire Book 1 eBook Q V Hunter 
Marcus wagers that a deadly spy mission will earn him freedom from slavery, but he hasn’t bargained on betrayal by the man he respects most in the world.
A thrilling espionage adventure set in the fourth-century Roman Empire, "A Veiled Assassin" takes us to a broiling Numidian desert suffering from military occupation, sabotaged oil exports, and fanatical terrorists.
"The Veiled Assassin" is the first in a series that pits Marcus against religious suicide martyrs, Gallo-Roman army rebels as well as the corrupt imperial eunuchs ruling the East—all of them embers of a world blindly smoldering toward its extinction.
Rich with action and intrigue, the Embers of Empire will delight fans of Bernard Cornwell, Steven Saylor and Robert Harris.
The Veiled Assassin A Novel of the Late Roman Empire Embers of Empire Book 1 eBook Q V Hunter
Good story with actual little known historical figures mentioned. Quite a few typos.Product details
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The Veiled Assassin A Novel of the Late Roman Empire Embers of Empire Book 1 eBook Q V Hunter Reviews
I hesitated for a couple of months before buying this book and the two others which make up this “Embers of Empire” trilogy. The reason was a simple one I was afraid of being disappointed. There are, of course, a lot of “swords and sandals” pieces of historical fiction out there on the Romans, and this one looked like just one more. Even the book’s topic, a young slave who wins his freedom by becoming a spy and becomes a Roman secret agent is hardly original. It is not quite a “rags to riches story”, but it certainly is yet another story about Roman spies, a genre that has already been explored by quite a few authors including Simon Scarrow, Manda Scott and Nick Brown, to mention just these three (there are others as well).
Given that I was somewhat prejudiced, I had a nice surprise because I mostly liked this book, however arrogant this may sound. I believe there are a couple of reasons for this.
The first reason is that the story told is a lively one, partly because it is a first-person narrative, and a rather attractive one. The author managed to make his hero rather sympathetic and likeable, even if there are a couple of events where this hero manages to struggle out of desperate predicaments and which may require readers to suspend disbelief. By the way, the commercial blurb that accompanies the book is simply rubbish and should be at least edited, if not removed, because it does not do credit either to this volume or to the next two ones. For instance, the bodyguard-slave who happens to be the hero of this story is not even called “Luke”, he is called Marcus. A related feature is that many of the main characters, including the hero, turn out to be not quite, or even not at all what they seem. So you can expect a few “surprises” along the way in a book that is cast as a cross between a thriller, and adventure story and a spy-story.
The second reason is the context, or to put it a bit differently, the period chosen by the author – the fourth century post Constantine, and the reigns of and murderous in-fights between his sons which had divided the Empire between themselves after killing off all relatives of an age to challenge their claims to the throne. This may not be entirely original either, if only because there are other “Roman thrillers” that take place during the same story. To be fair however, they are slightly later and tend to cover either events during the last years of Constantius II and Julian’s reign or the reign of Valentinian in Britain (“The Lion and the Lamb”, for instance). They are also not located in Roman North Africa, as this one is, and they do not deal with the mostly little known religious schism of the Donatists, which continued on and off for almost a century.
As usual with such novels, the author has taken some liberties with the historical record, or what little is known of it. He does however make an interesting case for some of the interpretations he make in his historical note, although I can hardly be more specific than this without introducing major spoilers. What is interesting here is the portrait and contrast drawn of the fanatic martyr-assassins, and how they are manipulated by their unscrupulous religious leaders when compared with another “protesting” but sincere and saintly bishop who is persecuted by the mostly heavy-handed and rather ruthless Roman authorities.
Where I found the author somewhat less convincing was in his alleged efforts to paint these North African Roman citizens and provinces into “an uncanny mirror of our own times” and the whole story as taking place in “a desert of foreign military occupation”, with “oil exports and suicide terrorists.” If this was indeed the author’s intention, then he has not been convincing if only because the “mirror” is awfully anachronistic and the comparisons are rather inapt, such as that one comparing (olive) “oil exports” in Roman times with (crude) oil exports nowadays. Also, it seems a bit of a stretch and an over-simplification to view Roman North Africa as “a desert of foreign military occupation”, given that the Roman presence lasted for about five hundred years and that at least part of the population was romanized in the process. This, by the way, is shown rather well in the book which is not as anachronistic as the “marketing blurb” makes it out to be. Finally, the book itself contains only a single instance of a so-called “suicide terrorist” and it is this case which gives this book its title.
One feature that “Roman buffs” might get slightly annoyed about, at times, is a degree of sloppiness in the use of terms. Examples include cavalrymen sometimes called “legionaries” or amphorae being rolled on the ground as if they were barrels. There are about a couple of dozen other similar cases spread across the book but they were not enough to spoil it for me.
If this had been possible, I would have rated this book something like 3.6 stars. Since this is not possible and three stars would be too harsh, I will default to a somewhat generous four stars.
Good story with actual little known historical figures mentioned. Quite a few typos.
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