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The second volume of Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy finds a master storyteller on top form, says Dominic Sandbrook

The second volume of Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy starts in familiar detective-thriller fashion. Two days before his hero's inauguration as consul of Rome, a boy's naked body is dragged from the Tiber. Traces of gold paint still glint on his nose and cheeks and in his hair are the remains of a red ribbon. His body has been slashed open from throat to groin, yet there is no blood, "only that dark, elongated cavity, like a gutted fish, filled with river mud". Behind his ear is a telltale indentation: the mark left by a hammer blow to stun him before the knife opened him up. And as Cicero looks at the body, his slave Tiro feels himself "to be in the presence of Evil – Evil as a palpable force, as potent as lightning".