Ode To a Banker, Lindsey Davis

12th Falco novel. 

In the long, hot Roman summer of AD74, Marcus Didius Falco, private informer and spare-time poet, gives a reading for his family and friends.  Things get out of hand as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who offers to publish Falco's work - a golden opportunity that rapidly palls. A visit to the Chrysippus scriptorium implicates him in a gruesome literary murder so when Petronius Longus, the over-worked vigiles enquiry chief, commissions him to investigate, Falco is forced to accept.