The senator from ancient Rome is recognized ...

Conn Iggulden’s “Emperor” is stunning. It begins with hints of a mystery and continues as a galvanizing historical thriller. Two boys, two friends, Gaius and Marcus, are growing up on the country estate of a Roman senator. As they mature into young men and hardened fighters, Gaius’ patrician father, Julius, is killed during a slave uprising and the 15-year-old takes his place in the Senate and as head of the family. Protected by an uncle, the general and Roman consul Marius, Gaius cannot avoid the poisonous politics of late-Republican Rome or the deadly contention between Marius and the rival consul, Sulla. By the end, Marius is dead, Marcus is soldiering in Macedonia and Gaius (his life spared by Sulla) is in flight, leaving his new bride behind. We know that he will fight another day. His name, and that of his friend, revealed close to the end, will be familiar to all.

Words like “brilliant,” “sumptuous” and “enchanting” jostle to be used, but scarcely convey the way Iggulden brings the schoolbook tale to life, or the compelling depictions of battle, treachery and everyday detail in a precarious world well lost but vividly re-created. Iggulden knows that history derives from “story.” And this story has barely begun. “The Gates of Rome” is its first, exhilarating, installment. Don’t miss it.

In “Silent Partner,” Stephen Frey dishes out 300-plus pages of punchy publicity for a good cause: opposition to racism. He does it in a fast-moving, zestful, stirring script that serves up corporate greed and capitalist compassion, managerial malfeasance and fast-cut violence, selfless motherhood and purulent prejudice, in a tortuous sauce full of twists and surprises. Angela Day, 31, is a successful mid-level banker in Richmond, Va. She has jet-black hair, gold-speckled green eyes, a slim body, large, firm breasts and a butterfly tattoo on one hip. All would be well had she not been framed by a two-timing husband and his rich, obnoxious father and lost her young son to their perfidious tricks. Divorced, she lives only for the minute quality time allowed with her 6-year-old and dreams of a world where justice and racial equality will prevail. When a mysterious multibillionaire pops up on the screen of her life, hope germinates along with danger.

Here are the makings of a topping thriller, were it not that commercials for the Cause interrupt the action, while didactic dialogue walks us through details of the racist villains’ nefarious schemes. As on TV, commendable messages pall when they repeat the same point. So: sizzling potential, compelling characters, an improbable film noir plot, dubious motivations; but the heart’s in the right place. And some may enjoy the cliches.

Margaret Truman, who knows Washington well since her days in the White House as the president’s daughter, has written one more of her Capital Crimes novels, appropriately theatrical for a capital where melodrama and burlesque intermesh. “Murder at Ford’s Theatre” begins with the discovery of a young woman slain in an alley behind the playhouse notorious for an earlier homicide. An intern in the office of Virginia Sen. Bruce Lerner, the vic did volunteer work at Ford’s and may have tendered amateur services for other performances on the side. The search for her bumper- offer carries two capable D.C. cops through a large cast of suspects, chief among them Jeremy Lerner, teenage son of the senator, and Clarise, his ex-wife, who directs the theater pending her expected confirmation as head of the National Endowment for the Arts. Jeremy is sexy, snarky, surly and a pain all around; but he has a cool excuse. While his parents clambered up their greasy poles, the infant they ignored turned into a punk with attitude and with the affluence to inflict it on others.

So we have a roundheeled stiff; an abrasive, arrogant suspect; parents too preoccupied to care much; cops and lawyers doing their job among malicious, misleading wits who confuse the issues; to which Truman adds generous helpings from biographies of Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth and lashings of Shakespeare. The yarn starts slow and steady, begins to complicate and accelerate, then rises to a crescendo with the help of a nut who thinks he is Booth and of a perfidious peculator who skulks until revealing his true colors. Some writers run out of steam before that. Not so Truman. But then, there’s enough crime in Washington and plenty of theatrical momentum to feed a lot more Capital Crimes mysteries to come. *