The lights of Rome have dimmed. When the Scorpion and his friends get back to the Holy See, it is a place of fear and death they find, a city cowering under Trebaldi's boot. Their only chance to destroy the Pope's power is to heed Rochnan's last words and look into the past of the Scorpion's mother.[...]

There are bad memories in Larry Max's past. Dark figures specialised in shady dealings that once bullied and defeated the young, novice IRS agent. He never forgot, though. And now those names are coming up again in relation to some relatively minor trading fraud. But when Larry begins unravelling th[...]

Larry B. Max is an unusual specialist from a little-known branch of the IRS, the all-powerful tax-collecting agency of the United States. Reading into tax-evasion and money-laundering rings the way a virtuoso pianist would read Mozart, Max has every technological method at his disposal to find links[...]

The Scorpion, whose mother Cardinal Trebaldi burnt at the stake for loving a man of the cloth, discovers that his father was the murdered Pope himself. When Trebaldi addresses a huge crowd at the end of the mourning period, the Scorpion is there to tell the truth about how the people's beloved Pope [...]