Eleven-year-old Flavia and her friends Jonathan, Lupus, and Nubia are invited to visit Pulchra, who asks them to uncover who is trying to poison her mother.

September AD 80. Flavia and her friends go to Rome to celebrate the Festival of Jupiter at Senator Cornix's town house. They befriend the young charioteer Scopas and quickly find themselves embroiled in a campaign to sabotage one of the rival racing factions.

In 1862 Nevada Territory, after finding his foster parents murdered and scalped, twelve-year-old Pinky Pinkerton, son of a railroad detective and a Sioux Indian, inherits a valuable deed and must hide from dangerous Whittlin Walt and his gang of desperados.

At a refugee camp following the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius which buried Pompeii, Flavia and her friends discover that children are disappearing and a very powerful citizen might be involved.

Jonathan and his friends are called to Rome by the emperor in the winter of 80 A.D. to find the new Prometheus believed to have brought an epidemic to the city, but Jonathan, obsessed with reuniting his parents, makes some unwise--and life-threatening--choices.

Flavia and Nubia follow Jonathan to Rome and into the Golden House built by the emperor Nero, where a dangerous assassin lurks.