Review:
This was a ton of fun. I was wondering why the tone sounded so familiar when I saw "a pseudonym for Tom Holt" and then I remembered I really liked "Expecting someone taller", which he wrote.
Think of this book as sort of historical fiction, but without all that silly business of having to do research about history and finding an event you have to learn a lot about and then have your plot follow roughly the outline of what happened.
Nah.
Just think: "Romans, Constantinople, siege, yep, sounds fun!" then write a book that ... sounds roman? Except romans are maybe blue?
Read it in one day, already started on the second book.