A taut thriller and a bittersweet love story,

Roman Circus reintroduces Giovanni

Stears, the CIA officer featured in Frank

O Neill s two previous novels, The Secret

Country and Agents of Sympathy. Stears has

returned to Rome, where he grew up and

where he still has ties to the nobility. But the

glorious city of his youth has become an

armed fortress, under siege by terrorists

who have kidnapped and assassinated an

American Army general.

Against a vivid backdrop of palatine villas

and diplomatic receptions, bombs and bru-

tality, Stears is reunited with his former

lover, Gabriella, an Italian princess whose

reckless passion nearly destroyed them

once before. Torn between love and duty,

family and country, sensuality and sav-

agery, Stears soon must come to grips with

the nihilistic Italian doctor and the Libyan

mastermind behind the terrorists--and with

his own past.

Laced with eroticism and politics, Ameri-

can pragmatism and Roman decadence,

Roman Circus is a fast-paced thriller and a

wrenching romance "---as well as an astute

portrait of a society and characters in a

maelstrom of violence and moral ambiguity.