Next in the adventures of Marcus Didius Falco, in Vespasian's Rome. Hired by a family (of sorts) to prevent a gold-digger from marrying their leader, Falco also needs to avoid a vengeful administrator who wants him clapped in irons permanently. Who is the real villain here? It takes a while to work out.

I listened to this, because the narration of these books is so good.

Love and real estate and money and why it's better to be sure to know what you're getting in the first two are the concerns in Falco's investigations into a woman who has been widowed 3 times in short order for clients who say they don't want their associate to be the 4th corpse. This one seemed a bit slow to me, with minimal though acute, political entanglements. The flounder scenes are precious though. ( )

A pleasant and amusing diversion, marred only by blatant anachronisms, some of them more than a thousand years out of date. Davis frequently has Falco using French terms, eight hundred years before the French language even existed. There are so many of these howlers, one can only assume that she is putting them in intentionally, so as to annoy pedants like me. ( )

What a good one. The turbot, the house moving and house losing. It's one of my favorites. ( )

This is the third of a historical fiction detective series, which is as stereotypically a “hard boiled” crime fiction book as you can get with a setting in Ancient Rome… which makes it very amusing on a meta level, as well as in fact, since the author adds a great deal of humor to the story.

Set in Rome, late summer, AD 71, the narrator is 30-year-old Marcus Didius Falco, a free citizen of Rome, and a private informer (i.e., private investigator), occasionally employed by Roman Emperor Vespasian. Or as Falco describes himself, “An informer; trying to turn an honest denarius in a distinctly inferior job.” While Falco was politically a republican rather than a believer in emperors, Vespasian suggested he might raise Falco’s social rank if he worked as an imperial agent. The appeal of this was that Falco might then be able to marry (or even date!) the love of his life, Helena Justina, who was a Roman senator’s daughter. Falco figured he needed at least four hundred thousand sesterces to be able to approach Helena. [Today it is believed that the sesterces has a modern equivalence ranging from $.50 to $1.50. Thus Falco would need at least something like $200,000 to be considered respectable enough to see a senator’s daughter.]

But Falco has had it with working for the Emperor, who was loathe to pay up, quibbled over expenses, and whose chief spy got him locked up in Lautumiae Prison, where he was stuck sleeping with the rats until his mother bailed him out.

Falco is very much involved with his large family, since his father is dead and he is now the titular head of the family. His mother was happy with Falco’s new job working for the Palace, having convinced herself it involved good money and simple work. Falco mused: “I was reluctant to let her discover so soon that it was the same old round of trudging after villains who chose to slouch through the streets when I wanted my lunch.”

Falco decides to back into private business. Private clients, reasoned Falco, were more likely to pay their bills.

Thus, in this book, he agrees to take a job working for the wealthy Nortensius women. These freed slaves suspect that one of their household is being pursued by a women, Severina Zotica, whose three previous husbands died under suspicious circumstances, with the widow getting richer after each “accident.”

The plot thickens with more deaths and nefarious motives among all concerned. Falco carries on at considerable risk to himself, and all the while trying to navigate his family life and love life with sardonic humor. As with previous books, by the end, everything becomes clear to Falco, and none of it was what he thought it to be in the beginning. His primary take away in this episode is that there is no such thing as blind justice - “Justice was for people who could afford it.” ( )