Set in ancient Rome, the story follows a group of schoolboys who try to solve several crimes: the attack on their teacher and the desecration of a temple wall.
When the pupils (sans Caius, who is skipping the day) arrive at the school the next morning, they find Xantippus locked inside his closet.
The boys head to inform Rufus about the good news when they discover the words "Caius is an idiot" painted on the wall of the local Minerva temple.
Blinded by a storm, Mucius ends up falling through an opening in the roof of a neighboring bathhouse and lands in a pool that is being drained for the night, which saves his life.
They sneak inside, but are trapped by Lukos, who confesses that he is responsible for the burglary in the school, the smearing of the temple wall, and Rufus' arrest because the boy had found out his most important secret.
When Tellus recovers consciousness, he confesses that he posed as a clairvoyant to pay off the massive debts he had accumulated due to his costly lifestyle.
The boys force Tellus to write a confession, but then he flees up the ladder to the roof just as Vinicius, Xantippus and a group of praetorians arrive to rescue them.
The party tracks Tellus to the bathhouse, where they find him dead after a fatal plunge into an already drained pool, and Rufus is freed in the nick of time.
Caius runs off to fetch Tiro, his father's secretary, and alert the urban prefect, Lucius Terrentius Manilius.
After a messenger delivers urgent news of Pollino's arrest by Vinicius to Manilius, the prefect and another conspirator, a barque's captain, decide to flee immediately.
Caius appears, having been freed by Udo, and tells them that he learned that after the battle in the Teutoburg Forest, a handful of legionnaires had escaped the massacre and buried the annihilated legions' war chest, which contained over ten million sestertii in gold.
Mucius realizes that the cage with the bear has been loaded onto the barque, and Vinicius and the Imperial agents immediately set out to chase it down.
The boys return to tell Xantippus, but then Quintus, a retired centurion who served under Vinicius, arrives with a package from Caius' sister Claudia.
Xantippus discovers a secret message imploring him to seek out Ben Gor, the only person who could save Caius, who was sentenced to death by the Emperor and about to be executed.
He succeeded, but was arrested and knocked out by two Praetorian guards before he could explain himself, and subsequently found himself accused of intending to assassinate the Emperor.
A group of Praetorians and an officer of the Emperor's secret police arrive and arrest the boys after it was discovered that Caius' coffin had been taken away.
In the journal Elementary English, the reviewer calls it a "rousing detective story" and notes that Winterfeld was inspired by actual graffiti found during the excavation of Pompeii.
[4] The Christian Science Monitor says Detective in Togas "neatly succeeds in constructing a lesson in ancient history around the plot of a whodunit and spinning the whole thing into a great tale for middle school readers".
[6] Kirkus Reviews describes it as "A good story and with its careful attention to Roman ways, this has its sparkle too"[7] and Publishers Weekly calls it "delightful and witty".
[8] For the 2003 reissue, reviewer Terri Schmitz says it is "action-packed and filled with details about what daily life was like for patrician Roman boys, providing painless history lessons along with the rousing story lines.
"[9] The Guardian says readers "end up learning loads of interesting information about Ancient Rome as you go along - and even a bit of Latin!
"[10] In 1958, Detectives in Togas was adapted by BBC Television in the United Kingdom as a six-episode children's serial under the title The Riddle of the Red Wolf.