Maier is a great historian and a very average writer of fiction. It's really too bad that he didn't just write this book as a history of Pilate instead of trying to create historical fiction. The history was fascinating, the fiction ho-hum (and fairly cheesy sometimes).

That being said, I enjoyed it much more than I thought I might. Seeing the Gospels from a Roman perspective was refreshing and anchored the stories of the faith in historical time. This benefit, alone, was worth an extra star.

I don't know if I'd recommend it but I'm glad I read it.