Rome. AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco, now Imperial Agent to Emperor Vespasian, is keeping busy tidying up corpses, kicking over the traces of a failed coup, making a bit on the side in stolen lead ingots. But a new plot to usurp the purple robes of power puts Falco on the back of a mule with a one-way ticket down the Appian Way - bumping into trouble, treason and Helena Justina, a senator's daughter he's trying hard to forget.

Roger Shallot, descrito por The Times como el Flashman de la época de los Tudor, vuelve a inmiscuirse en asuntos diplomáticos, y eso siempre tiene resultados imprevisibles.

Tras los episodios relatados en Los crímenes de la rosa blanca y El cáliz envenenado, Roger Shallot cuenta en esta nueva entrega de sus memorias el caso de Stafford, duque de Buckingham, quien, en su búsqueda del Santo Grial y Excalibur, tuvo la osadía de enfrentarse a los templarios.

The Silver Pigs is the classic novel which introduced readers around the world to Marcus Didius Falco, a private informer with a knack for trouble, a tendency for bad luck, and a frequently incovenient drive for justice. When Marcus Didius Falco encounters the young and very pretty Sosia Camillina in the Forum, he senses immediately that there is something amiss. When she confesses that she is fleeing for her life, Falco offers to help her and, in doing so, he gets himself mixed up in a deadly plot involving stolen ingots, dangerous and dark political machinations, and, most hazardous of all, one Helena Justina, a brash, indominable senator's daughter connected to the very traitors that Falco has sworn to expose.

“Rats are always bigger than you expect.” Falco, ancient Rome's hangdog investigator, hates sharing a cell with a rodent - though being bailed by his old mother is almost as embarassing. His high-born girlfriend can't decide if she wants him, and Titus Caesar's reward for past services is a wet fish. Hoping for a better life, or at least a better apartment, he takes on new clients. On the elegant slopes of the Pincian Hill, three nouveau riche freedmen with two flashy wives are under siege by a clever redhead. Severina Zotica has a foul-mouthed parrot, an odd connection with a snake dancer—and a very suspicious past. As he pursues this flame-haired fortune-hunter, Falco finds himself beset by violent rentracketeers, poisoners, and women without consciences who have dangerous designs on him.