The Ghost Player

by Nick Aaron

She was in on the game but a reluctant player The game started right after Nero’s suicide in AD 68, and his death was part of the game. He’d been tricked by the other players into taking his own life, opening the race, the free-for-all to seize power in Rome. What ensued went down in History as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’.

But from the start the rivals vying for the top prize discovered that Nero had a half-sister, eighteen-year-old Antonia, the daughter of Claudius and Agrippina, and using her as a pawn became part of the game. Only, she didn’t want to be used—or eliminated—and managed to thwart them so well that in the end they called her ‘the ghost player’.

Then Antonia went back to being Desiderata, married and mother of three, a Christian, and a ‘Seeker of Justice’ by trade. Until one day, in AD 86, her old enemy Numa Manlius tried to revive the game, and Desi had to take up one more challenge.



“In this last volume of the six Blind Sleuth Mysteries dedicated to Desiderata, Nick Aaron gives us a nice summary of her she was always a ‘ghost player’ in the exciting history of first-century Rome.” — The Weekly Banner

This is the last volume of the six Blind Sleuth Mysteries dedicated to

The Desiderata Stone

The Desiderata Gold

The Desiderata Riddle

Desiderata’s Lost Cause

August in Pompeii

The Ghost Player

258 pages, Paperback

Published April 26, 2025

About the author

Nick Aaron is Dutch, but he was born in South Africa, where he attended a British-style boarding school, in Pietersburg, Transvaal. Later he lived in Lausanne (Switzerland), in Rotterdam, Luxembourg and Louvain. Currently he works for the European Parliament in Brussels, proofreading legislative texts in all 24 official languages.
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