What responsibility does the writer of historical fiction have to the historical record? This tautly written, rather bleak thriller of Imperial Roman politics raises that question for the reader. In his author’s note, David Barbaree inform the reader that The Exiled is a work of fiction and that he has taken liberties that a novelist is allowed. But since many readers of historical fiction read the genre to be informed as well as to be entertained, it behoves the writer to inform his reader where he has taken these liberties. Unfortunately, Barbaree does not. So the unsuspecting reader might believe that Domitilla, the sister of the Emperor Titus, was alive and a key player in the events of his reign, including the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, when in fact so far as we know she died a decade before all the events of this story took place. Barbaree’s entertaining fancy as to the true fate of the Emperor Nero, which was the focus of his first novel, The Deposed, continues in The Exiled, and its inclusion is more understandable given the world he has constructed. Perhaps the book is best taken as an imaginative working out of the ‘What if?’ scenario that Nero did not die, but lived on, working behind the scenes of Imperial politics. As such, the book might perhaps be best thought of as historical fantasy, sans dragons and gods and nymphs, but with similar scant regard for what probably happened. Readers allergic to the use of the present tense and modern-day vocabulary in historical fiction might also want to be wary.