Rivals of the Republic

The exhilarating historical novel featuring ancientRome’s great new heroine, Hortensia, who is “passionate, articulate, fallibleand, better still, inspired by a real woman” (Ruth Downie, author of thebestselling Medicus series)

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In this “stunning novel” (bestselling author Alison Weir), Annelise Freisenbruch presents the great new heroine of Roman historical fiction, who must navigate the male dominated courts of law in her quest to uncover a sinister plot to overthrow the Republic.As Rivals of the Republic begins, Roman high society is humming with gossip about the sudden, suspicious suicide of a Roman senator. Shortly afterward, the body of a Vestal Virgin is discovered in the river Tiber. When the Roman authorities turn a strangely blind eye, Hortensia, the daughter of the capital's most celebrated lawyer, begins investigating a trail of murders that leads straight into the dark heart of Rome.Defying her husband and her father and rebelling against the constraints imposed upon her sex, Hortensia plunges deeper into the corrupt underworld that lurks in the shadows cast by the city's all-powerful elite. When more key witnesses are silenced by an unknown mastermind, Hortensia is forced to seek an unconventional ally: Lucrio, an ex-gladiator with secrets of his own.Using her supreme knowledge of the period and drawing from historical accounts of the daughter of famed Roman orator Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, Annelise Freisenbruch delivers a meticulously accurate and suspenseful story that will have readers gripped until the final, harrowing pages.