Product Description

From the author of THREE HANDS IN THE FOUNTAIN and TIME TO DEPART, a crime story featuring Marcus Didius Falco who is determined to solve the mystery of a young girl's disappearance despite his new imperial responsibilities, his troublesome new partner, Aelianus, and the jealous activities of his former partner Petronius.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55430 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Falco is back from North Africa, with new-found respectability and a dead brother-in-law to cope with. Appointed to a post in the religious hierarchy--keeper of the city's sacred geese--Davis's imperial Roman sleuth soon finds himself caught up in the murder of a member of one of the sacred brotherhoods and the disappearance of the most likely new candidate for the order of vestal virgins. His wife's brother tripped over the first of these and he himself was approached by the virgin, a small, frighteningly upper-class girl, and asked to help with her fears that one of her family meant her harm. Davis's command of the complexities of Roman society and attitudes has rarely been so impressively on display; Falco's world moves between the comic, the tragic and the horrid without missing a beat, or a trick. The portrait of the Emperor Vespasian that has intermittently grown up in the background of these excellent historical thrillers acquires more areas of light and shadow, and the love story of the low-rent public informer Falco and his aristocratic wife Julia becomes more touching. Davis's book Two For the Lions won the Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger for historical thrillers. --Roz Kaveney

Review
Helena and Falco are going up in the world: they've bought a house (well, Helena has) - and Falco's life becomes ever-more stressful, especially after a six-year-old girl tells him someone in her family wants to murder her. When she disappears he's faced with the job of finding her. Beset by other problems, domestic and professional, it's difficult for him to keep his eye on the ball. A treat for Falco followers. Those new to the series should start with Silver Pigs. (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

Falco 11: a little girl is in trouble
This is the eleventh in a 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.

The book begins in May AD74. Falco has just returned from Africa, and had the unpleasant duty of telling is favourite sister that she is now a widow, her husband having been fed to the lions at the end of the previous book. He finds a six-year-old girl, Gaia Laelia, the grand-daughter of one of Rome's senior priests waiting for him. She is convinced that her family want to murder her, but nobody takes her seriously. Neither does Falco and she goes off in a huff.

Falco's scheme to earn the favour of the Emperor, and enough money for promotion to the Equestrian order (middle class) by acting as a tax auditor and earning large sums for both the Empire and himself by cathcing people cheating on their taxes has been successful, and he has finally gained the status he has been searching for the previous ten books or so.

But before he has long to celebrate this status, Gaia Laelia's uncle, another Chief Priest, shows up: the girl is a canddiate to be a Vestal Virgin. And before he knows it, things take a turn for the worse: Falco's brother in law finds a murdered member of a religious order, and then Gaia Laelia disappears. Falco now has to investigate murky goins on among Rome's priestly orders ...

I initially tried this series because I had enjoyed the "Cadfael" mediaeval detective stories by Ellis Peters. Where Cadfael is excellent, Falco is brilliant. Ellis Peters herself (or to use her real name, Edith Pargeter) said of the early books of the series, 'Lindsey Davis continues her exploration of Vespasian's Rome and Marcus Didius Falco's Italy with the same wit and gusto that made "The Silver Pigs" such a dazzling debut and her rueful, self-deprecating hero so irresistibly likeable.'

Funny, exciting, and based on a painstaking effort to re-create the world of the early Roman empire between 70 and 76 AD.

If you have met and enjoyed either the Cadfael or Thraxas series, this is even better.

It isn't absolutely essential to read these stories in sequence, as the mysteries Falco is trying to solve are all self-contained stories and each book can stand on its own. Having said that, there is some ongoing development of characters and relationships and I think reading them in the right order does improve the experience.

The full Falco series, in chronological order, consists at the moment of:

The Silver Pigs
Shadows in Bronze
Venus in Copper
The Iron Hand of Mars
Poseidon's Gold
Last Act in Palmyra
Time to Depart
A Dying Light in Corduba
Three Hands in the Fountain
Two for the Lions
One Virgin Too Many
Ode to a Banker
A Body in the Bath house
The Jupiter Myth
The Accusers
Scandal taks a Holiday
See Delphi and Die
Saturnalia

I have read and can warmly recommend all of these.

Great as usual
Lindsay Davis is such an easy novelist to read with her regular protagonist Marcus Didius Falco it is difficult to put her books down. This novel is set in Rome during the first century AD where Falco is an informer (private eye). He has just returned to Rome after conducting a census for the emperor Vespasian when a very young girl visits him with the tale that someone in her family is trying to kill her. Falco dismisses this but when she disappears he is commissioned by the emperor to find her. The plot continues with Falco getting into a few scrapes before he solves the case.

The Eleventh in the Series
This is the eleventh novel in the mystery series featuring Marcus Didius Falco, an informer and sleuth in Rome at the time of Vespasian. A series of books that have become hugely popular, so much so that the author is now at the forefront of historical mystery writers. It was probably a stroke of genius on her part to have novels that are extremely well researched and contain all the elements that would be and should be found in the Roman world of circa AD70, but to have a lead character who has the vocabulary of a present day New York cop.

In this novel Falco becomes embroiled with the religious cults of his beloved Rome after he is approached by a young girl, who claims that someone is trying to kill her. The girl has been proposed as a Vestal Virgin, a highly sought after position, although most of the city believe that the voting is fixed and that another girl will win. Falco and Helena are having dinner a few days later with helea's parents, when Camillus Aelianus returns home shaken to the core at discovering a man's dead body in a Sacred Grove.

Falco has to put his detective's hat on once again, but somewhat reluctantly after all he has recently been given the singular honour of Procurator of the Sacred Geese and he is finding out that the ones with feathers on that strut about and make that stupid noise are not half as attractive as those that haven't and don't . . .