Lindsey Davis - Saturnalia

Review by Ro Bennett on show 19th Nov.
love Lindsey Davis Books – they are well researched, funny and exciting. Saturnalia is the 18th in the series of excellent detective stories set in Vespasian’s Roman Empire and featuring the informer Marcus Didius Falco. Informers in ancient Rome were something between a private detective and a government spy.

You don’t have to read these books in sequence because they are all self-contained stories and each can stand on its own, but there is some ongoing development of characters and relationships, so reading them in the right order improves the experience. The books are consistently good. You can visualise life in Roman times, sometimes it’s harsh and pretty brutal.

In this book it’s 76 AD at the start of the Roman Holiday of Saturnalia.
As Lindsey Davis describes the mayhem of preparations, family squabbles and drunken parties, it sounds just like modern day Christmas!

In the fourth book of the series, The Iron Hand of Mars, set five years before, Falco had been sent on an undercover mission to the wilds of Germany to broker a deal with a Veleda, a tribal prophetess who was fighting to free her area from Roman Occupation. Veleda had kept her side of the bargain, but an ambitious and incompetent governor has tricked her and brought her as a captive to Rome where he intends to have her executed as part of his victory parade. Veleda escapes from house arrest, leaving behind the decapitated body of a young man. Falco, since he knows her, is charged with finding and recapturing her. Falco is pitted against his old rival Chief Spy Anacrites in a race to find the fugitive. This is how Falco describes Anacrites :
Anacrites and I had occasionally worked together. Don’t let me give the impression I despised him. He was a festering fistula of pestilential pus. I treated anything that venomous only with respect. Our relationship was based on the purest emotion: hate.

In Saturnalia Lindsey Davis includes a list of principle characters and the family trees of Falco and his wife Helena Justina which are very entertaining in themselves. I love the way she portrays her characters – she is very astute and their interactions are realistic and humorous. You can tell from the books that Lindsey Davis is hugely enjoying the process of writing them and that’s infectious – they are hugely enjoyable to read!

The final coup is the Afterword - I was sniggering to the end!
By Ro Bennett