IDES OF BLOOD A Historical Fiction Thriller The physicians counted twenty-three wounds. History accepted twenty-three wounds. For two thousand years, twenty-three wounds have been enough. Nikias knows there were twenty-four. Rome, 44 BC. Julius Caesar lies dead on the floor of the Theatre of Pompey, and the city is tearing itself apart. Senators are fleeing. Slaves are weeping. Mark Antony is preparing the most dangerous funeral oration in the history of the Republic. And Nikias — Greek-born freedman, physician, a man who spent eleven years reading Caesar's body the way other men read texts — is crouched over his former patron's corpse with a lamp and a growing sense that something is profoundly wrong. Ides of Blood is a forensic thriller and moral tragedy set in the blood-soaked weeks following the most famous assassination in history. It is a novel about the gap between what happened and what history is allowed to remember. About the people who are given the full truth and must choose, alone and without witnesses, what it is worth. About the founding lies that empires require — and the single, quiet, forgotten person who knew them for what they were. The pace of a whodunit. The weight of Sophocles. Rome was built on a lie. Nikias is the only man who knows which one.