This is the second in the Falco series of Ancient Rome mysteries. I read the first – The Silver Pigs – a couple of months ago. This one picks up from the end of the previous and ties up a lot of the loose ends. You really do need to have read the first one before reading this one – although the first one is self-contained.

I do like the author’s prose – there are occasionally moments of beauty in the book. Mainly it is the flippant, amusing, commentary from Falco.

I’ll give it a couple of months before I read the next one: I don’t want to feel obliged to go charging through all 10 or 12 in one go.

Ahh, another madcap adventure with Marcus Didius Falco!! A book that is not only fun, but engages your brain fully. You can't read this with half a brain; there are too many things you have to infer from double-meaning conversations and cryptic descriptions. But you also don't want to miss any of the humour!

I enjoyed the second instalment of this series more than the first. This is partly because, if I'm honest, the whole fraud plotline in book 1 didn't always make 100% sense to me. Whereas the “hunt the conspirators” plotline to this one was crystal clear and very entertaining with all its twists and turns and journeys up and down the country. Even though this book was much longer, I really raced through it. I was fully engaged.

I can never guess what Falco is going to do next, I can never read his mind, and in some ways this makes him an infuriating protagonist to follow but in others it makes it greatly entertaining and certainly keeps up the suspense and “I wonder what's going to happen next?” factor. The Ancient Roman culture is once again all-encompassing and the Flavians are thriving. Every passage involving an animal was hilarious, whether it was the antics of the sacrificial goat, or Nero the bull, or Little Sweetheart the ugly horse. Amazing.

Bring on the next one!

CAWPILE rating:

Characters: 9.5/10
Atmosphere: 10/10
Writing: 9/10 although there was a particularly hilarious typo in the first edition copy I was reading
Plot: 9/10
Intrigue: 9/10, particularly good in the first half I think when you're not quite sure who's committing these additional murders
Logic: 9/10
Enjoyment: 10/10

CAWPILE average: 9.36
= goodreads rating: 4.68*

Falco is still working for the emperor and trying to fix his own complicated love life. The conspirators in the first book are still hanging around causing trouble and now a couple of them have turned up dead. Vespasian sends Falco out to track down the rest of them and warn them off. But someone wants Falco out of the way.

I like these books - Falco reminds me of a Roman Archie Goodwin. But they are a little too long, I think. I get distracted and have a hard time taking everything in.

This book starts right after book #1 stops, and I loved it too. The most enjoyable parts of the book are the intriacies of Falco's relationships with other people, then the plot - I wouldn't quite call this a "mystery" as the culprit(s) are obvious from the start and it's a bit more like a police procedural except that Falco is an "informer" in ancient Rome. There was a slowness to some parts of the book but it never failed to hold my interest, and I'm going straight on to book #3 from here.

The Marcus Didus Falco series really should be an HBO TV series. It's a highly engrossing mystery series, with incredibly interesting characters, and Lindsey Davis makes the Roman Empire really come alive. This book, the second in the series, is really no exception. Davis makes Pompeii and Herculanium (where the majority of the action takes place) feel like living, breathing cities.

If I had one complaint about the book, it has to do with

Spoiler

the discovery that Pertinax is still alive. There was no evidence in advance to show he was still alive before then. To be fair, it's a surprise to Falco as well, but it could have been handled a little better, I think.

Falco, as a character, is probably one of the better realized examples of a detective who is too pig-headed for their own good. While some of the classic hard-boiled PIs of the 30s have this trait, we rarely see enough of their lives and friends outside of the job to see how this changes that side of things. Falco has family and friends with families, so we get a better look at how his stubbornness effects his life outside of the job.

As a fan of historical mysteries (like the Cadfael novels by [a:Ellis Peters|4046|Ellis Peters|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1242605103p2/4046.jpg], I really enjoyed this book, and I'm probably going to read the rest of the books in the series, at least until it gets bad.