Product Description

Another Falco detective story, set in Rome AD 73. Distracted by the apparent murder of a star man-eating lion, Falco uncovers a bitter rivalry between the gladiators' trainers. When one also ends up dead, Falco is forced to investigate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #211026 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 390 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The further Davies gets into her series of private eye (or, to be precise, public informer) thrillers set in the Rome of Vespasian, the more she learns what it is that she does best. Falco is working for the tax department, investigating used gladiator scams, and stumbles into more murders. The various mysteries here--the stabbing of the arena- lion trained to eat criminals, the murder of a famous gladiator generally considered past his prime--are solved elegantly enough and with a genial ruthlessness appropriate to the period in which they are set.

Davies never forgets that this society rests on the backs of slaves and has a taste for bloodshed which even we might consider excessive. But what we read Davies for is partly for the continuing soap opera of on-the-make Falco, his upper-class wife Helena and their variously rackety, lowlife or snobbish connections, and partly for her simply wonderful knowledge of how things worked. We learn, for example, a lot about the wild- beast trade and provincial resentments in a North Africa which the Romans still suspect are more Carthaginian than not; Davies's novels are entertaining and informative, and leave one wanting more.--Roz Kaveney

Excerpted from Two for the Lions by Lindsey Davis. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
ROME: December, AD73 - April AD74 My partner and I had been well set up to earn our fortunes until we were told about the corpse.
Death, it has to be said, was ever-present in those surroundings. Anacrites and I were working among the suppliers of wild beasts and gladiators for the arena Games in Rome; every time we took our auditing note tablets on a site visit, we spent the day surrounded by those who were destined to die in the near future and those who would only escape being killed if they killed someone else first. Life, the victors' main prize, would be in most cases temporary. But there amongst the fighters' barracks and the big cats' cages, death was commonplace. Our own victims, the fat businessmen whose financial affairs we were so delicately probing as part of our new career, were themselves looking forwards to long, comfortable lives - yet the formal description of their business was Slaughter. Their stock-in-trade was measured as units of mass murder; their success would depend upon those units satisfying the crowd in straightforward volume terms, and upon their devising ever more sophisticated ways to deliver the blood.
We knew there must be big money in it. The suppliers and trainers were free men - a prerequisite of engaging in commerce, however sordid - and so they had presented themselves with the rest of Roman society in the Great Census. This had been decreed by the Emperor on his accession, and it was not simply intended to count heads. When Vespasian assumed power in a bankrupt Empire after the chaos of Nero's reign, he famously declared that he would need four hundred million sesterces to restore the Roman world. Lacking a personal fortune, he set out to find funding in the way that seemed most attractive to a man with middle-class origins. He named himself and his elder son Titus as Censors, then called up the rest of us to give an account of ourselves and of everything we owned. Then we were swingingly taxed on the latter, which was the real point of the exercise.
The shrewd amongst you will deduce that some heads of household found themselves excited by the challenge; foolish fellows tried to minimise the figures when declaring the value of their property. Only those who can afford extremely cute financial advisers ever get away with this, and since the Great Census was intended to rake in four hundred million it was madness to attempt a bluff. The target was too high; evasion would be tackled head-on - by an Emperor who had tax farmers in his recent family pedigree.
The machinery for extortion already existed. The Census traditionally used the first principle of fiscal administration: the Censors had the right to say: we don't believe a word of what you're telling us.Then they made their own assessment, and the victim had to pay up accordingly. There was no appeal. No; that's a lie. Free men always have the right to petition the Emperor. And it's a perk of being Emperor that he can twitch his purple robe and augustly tell them to get lost.
While the Emperor and his son were acting as Censors, it would in any case be a waste of time to ask them to overrule themselves. But first they had to make the hard-hitting reassessments, and for that they needed help. To save Vespasian and Titus from being forced personally to measure the boundaries of estates, interrogate sweaty Forum bankers, or pore over ledgers with an abacus - given that they were simultaneously trying to run the tattered Empire after all - they were now employing my partner and me. The Censors needed to identify cases where they could clamp down. No emperor wants to be accused of cruelty. Somebody had to spot the cheats who could be reassessed without causing an outcry, so Falco & Partner had been hired - at my own suggestion and on an extremely attractive fee basis - to investigate low declarations.
We had hoped this would entail a cosy life scanning columns of neat sums on best quality parchment in rich men's luxurious studies: no such luck. I for one was known to be tough, and as an informer I was probably thought to have slightly grubby origins. So Vespasian and Titus had thwarted me by deciding that they wanted the best value for hiring Falco & Partner (the specific identity of my Partner had not been revealed, for good reasons). They ordered us to forget the easy life and to investigate the grey economy.
Hence the arena. It was thought that the trainers and suppliers were lying through their teeth - as they undoubtedly were, and so was everybody. Anyway their shifty looks had caught the attention of our imperial masters, and that was what we were probing on that seemingly ordinary morning, when we were unexpectedly invited to look at a corpse.

Customer Reviews

Falco refuses to "lie down with lions"!
There's no place like Rome, where all roads lead to, and Marcus Didius Falco, ace Roman Sleuth, finds himself in another dilemma in author Lindsey Davis' "Two for the Lions." And Davis has no trouble maintaining her momentum in this latest of the Falco series.

This time Falco is working as a tax investigator, appointed by the Emperor Vaspacian himself--but it's no ordinary tax investigation! He's on the trail of fraud committed by the "bestiarii" (the slaugherers) and the "lanistae" (the suppliers for the gladiator games). This "game" is deadly and the affable (but quite competent) Falco finds that dinner for the lions may include himself! His pursuits lead him and his friend Helena to Tripoli--seems simple enough but first Falco has to render aid to Helena's youngest brother, who seems caught in the middle!

Riddled with bits of humor as well as first-form suspense, "Two for the Lions" also offers history-with-an-exciting-twist. In addition, Davis doesn't hesitate to take pot shots at the local bureaucracy, and politics, society (a real "Roman a clef"!). And she is sure not to disappoint her "legions" of fans!

Probably the Best Yet
This is the tenth 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 the tenth novel Falco and Helena Justina now have a baby girl (Three Hands in the Fountain)

It is AD73 and the Emperor Vespasian has come up with a good idea for making money. Why not hold a census, after all if the senate know who everyone is and where they live it will be much easier to impose taxes on them. Falco and Partner become Censors. Well someone has to do it. There job is to investigate fraudulent claims, a messy, but lucrative business.

Unfortunately for Falco his `partner' is none other than Anacrites, a no good low life and palace spy. While investigating the people who run the gladiator schools and wild beast shows, Falco is involved in the mysterious death of a lion, an escaped leopard and a dead gladiator. There is much rivalry among the men who organise the vast games in Rome. It is a cut throat world where life is cheap and killing a man comes as second nature to many of the people involved in Falco's latest case.

another brilliant read
This book had me in stitches as I once more enjoyed Falco's exploits. Ms. Davis dry wit, coupled with a detailed knowledge of Roman History engages the attention of all my family. The Falco stories are some of the best historical crime fiction I have come across. I strongly recomment it to anyone who enjoys Ellis Peters, Paul Doherty and similar authors.