Product Description

For Marcus Didius Falco, agent to the Emperor Vespasian, Alexandria holds fascination and a hint of fear. Beautiful, historic and famously unruly, the great cosmopolitan city wears Roman rule lightly. While his wife, Helena Justina, wants to see the Lighthouse and the Pyramids, Falco has a mission at the Great Library that soon turns out to involve much more than stock-taking its innumerable scrolls. A mysterious death in the world-famous library bring him into immediate conflict with the darker side of academic life. With forensic science in its infancy, even an illegal autopsy fails to find real answers.To solve the crime for the Roman Prefect - if indeed it is a crime - Falco will have to draw on his own doggedness and intuition, at first supported only by Helena's commonsense and the loyal backup of her brother Aulus, who goes under cover as a student among the in-fighting academics. The philosophers lust after fame and fortune so ruthlessly there is soon another terrifying death, this time at the royal zoo. At the same time, his original innocent mission is overshadowed by the machinations of his Uncle Fulvius, who is living in Alexandria with his partner Cassius for obscure reasons. Their involvement in local affairs already seems shady when they are joined by their crony, Falco's father, Geminus, a man well known for disreputable business practices. If the irrepressible Pa has had any hand in what has gone wrong at the Library, Falco knows he stands no chance...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11710 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

About the Author
Lindsey Davis has written twenty novels, beginning with The Course of Honour, the love story of the Emperor Vespasian and Antonia Caenis. Her bestselling mystery series features laid-back First Century detective Marcus Didius Falco and his partner Helena Justina, plus friends, relations, pets and bitter enemy the Chief Spy. Her books are translated into many languages and serialised on BBC Radio 4. Past Chair of the Crimewriters' Association and a Vice President of the Classical Association, she has won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Dagger in the Library, and a Sherlock award for Falco as Best Comic Detective. She was born in Birmingham but now lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Falco 19: the body in the Great Library

This is number nineteen in a series of excellent detective stories set in Vespasian's Roman Empire and featuring the informer Marcus Didius Falco. It has perhaps the best opening in the series so far:

"They say you can see the Lighthouse from thirty miles away. Not in the day, you can't."

Informers in ancient Rome were something between a private detective and a government spy: in the cast list at the start of the book Falco now describes himself as "fixer, traveller and playwright."

It is spring AD77. Falco's wife Helena Justina has always wanted to see all of the "Seven Wonders of the World". In a previous book, "See Delphi and Die" Falco and Helena have seen the Temple of Zeus at Olympus. Falco writes that they had also visited Athens on the same trip.

(Pedant alert: there was more than one ancient list of the seven wonders of the world, but neither the traditional list of seven wonders compiled by Philo of Byzantium in 225 BC, nor any of the other contemporary versions I can find, include the Parthenon or anything else at Athens. Never mind.)

When Helena gets an invitation to pay a family visit to Falco's uncle in Alexandria, she realises that accepting the invitation would give her the opportunity to see three more wonders. These are the Colossus of Rhodes (which they saw on the way to Alexandria before the start of this book), the Pharos or Great Lighthouse at Alexandria, and the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Gisa.

The visit will also take in the Great Library at Alexandria, and it turns out that Emperor Vespasian has a little job he wants done which requires a trip to the Great Library. So, despite the fact that Helena is several months pregnant with their third child, Falco accepts the mission and they set off for Alexandria with the family.

But the morning after they arrive in Alexandria, a centurion interrupts their breakfast with news of, to paraphrase an Agatha Christie title, a body in the Great Library. The librarian himself has been found in his office, apparently murdered. As he is known to be the Emperor's fixer, Falco is asked to investigate ...

To judge by the other reviews, some readers feel that this series is losing a bit of its' edge, but personally I am not one of them. I found the humour delightful and apart from the slight clanger about the list of wonders I thought there were a lot of interesting historical details added about the first century empire.

I originally tried this series because I had enjoyed Ellis Peters' "Brother Cadfael" detective stories. 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 77 AD.

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 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
Alexandria
Nemesis (Due June 2010)

I can warmly recommend all of the books in this series published to date. (Obviously not "Nemesis" yet!)

Don't forget to replace the cork
We should never leave a wine bottle uncorked for too long, for the contents become flat and uninteresting. I thought I'd never say it about Lindsey Davis, but this book came to the verge of boring me. The usual Falco zing was missing. Here and there you catch a faint taste of it, but not often. And why we see and hear so little of the undaunted Helena bewilders me. A little more of her usual insights would have made much difference. But she's somewhere, for some reason, in the shadows.
And that's where this book is best left: in a corner somewhere. Unless Mrs Davis can manage better next time, live with your Falco memories (or read the previous books again.) I don't recommend anyone to buy this, certainly not a newcomer to Falco.

Another top quality "whodunnit"
After the brilliance of "saturnalia" it was always going to be hard for Lindsey Davis to come up with another excellent thriller in this long running series. Many had wondered whether it would get harder for Davis to continue to come up with good storylines after 20 years of Falco adventures.
Loyal readers need have no concerns. This is yet another top quality adventure for Falco, who, is once again on his travels. Many prefer Falco to stick to sleuthing in Rome but i personally like him to take off with Helena and the kids to some exotic locale. There is plenty here for loyal Falco fans, but newcomers will be lost. There is no lack of slick banter, good humour, family squabbles and a complex plot which will keep everyone on their toes. Not to be missed