In the British Museum sits a little clay tablet, six centimeters long and five centimeters wide. Ancient Babylonians were the first to use such tablets as a way of recording political and celestial events, and the tradition continued through the Hellenistic age. Whoever drew the watch on the night that produced the one in Bloomsbury—June 11, 323 B.C.—must have expected the heavens to display something fierce. Earlier that day, Alexander the Great died. But the heavens did not care. The scribe could see nothing. His entry for that night reads simply “Clouds.”

The observation could not have been more prescient. Alexander had not appointed a successor, and the fate of the empire that stretched some three-thousand miles from the Indus River valley to the shores of the Adriatic was, well, cloudy. Alexander had said only that his rule should pass “to the strongest.” But which of the seven Bodyguards, Alexander’s closest companions, did that mean? And what of Alexander’s unborn child? Or his half-wit half-brother, Philip? Or the wonderfully named Antigonus the One-eyed, an accomplished and ambitious regent in Asia Minor?

Alexander had not appointed a successor, and the fate of the empire was cloudy.

James Romm’s Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander and the War for Crown and Empireis the thrilling story of the paths these claimants followed in the years after Alexander’s death. Its action resembles nothing as much as a film noir, played out on the open expanses of the