Twelve-year-old Crispin has lived on the streets since he was nine — with only his wits and his daring to sustain him, and only his silent dog, Harley, to call his friend. He is always on the move, never lingering in any one place long enough to risk being discovered. Still, there are certain places he returns to. In the midst of the tumultuous city, they are havens of solitude: like the hushed environs of St. Mary Salome Cemetery, a place where Crispin can feel at peace — safe, at least for a while, from the fearsome memories that plague him . . .
Crispin is a dignified cat with an undignified lifestyle. He lives with a family that simply doesn't appreciate him. (He feels.) If he's not blamed for things that he didn't do, then he is treated like a toy. Or worse, ignored as if he were a piece of furniture.
Crispin is a master mosaicist, creating beautiful art with colored stones and glass. Summoned to Sarantium by imperial request, he bears a Queen's secret mission, and a talisman from an alchemist. Once in the fabled city, with its taverns and gilded sanctuaries, chariot races and palaces, intrigues and violence, Crispin must find his own source of power in order to survive-and unexpectedly discovers it high on the scaffolding of his own greatest creation.
The second volume of the Sarantine Mosaic continues the adventure of the provincial mosaic-maker Crispin in the imperial capital Sarantium, a fantasy-fiction version of Byzantine Constantinople. At center stage is Crispin's involvement with Rustem of Bassania and his family, who, after saving the Bassanian emperor's life, have been sent to Sarantium as spies. (This is a reward?) When Rustem enters the city, his bodyguard is killed, and he becomes part of the circle that includes Crispin, Crispin's rescued slave-girl mistress, the exiled queen of Antae, and a fine and authentically limned lot of soldiers, chariot racers, ordinary people, and members of the imperial household.
Degraded knight Crispin Guest is the hardboiled, reluctant investigator in Veil of Lies, first in a "medieval noir" mystery series. He sorely needs the fee offered by Nicholas Walcote, a rich merchant who fears his wife may be an adulteress and wants to know the truth. Accepting the distasteful task, Crispin tracks Philippa Walcote through the late fourteenth-century "mean streets of London." When he reports back, he finds the merchant stabbed to death on his study floor. No one and nothing in this new venture is quite what it first appears to be.
