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Century The Accusers
Lindsey Davis's Falco thrillers normally focus on how like us the Romans were; <I>The Accusers</I> concentrates on an important difference. Prosecutors were rewarded with a portion of the guilty's goods, or fined to compensate the innocent. When a senator, found guilty in a corruption trial, apparently kills himself, Falco is hired to prove he was murdered because suicide nullifies the prosecution's financial claims. Only the question is: which of the late Metellus' heirs poisoned him, since almost all of them had more than one motive? Falco finds himself and his wife Helena caught up once again in the dark side of Roman high society and all the interesting ways in which it is contiguous with the busy life of sordid streets. <p>Davis's books are always at their best when Falco, as our viewpoint, is finding out something he does not know about how things work; this is a good detective story partly because of the exposition of the Roman legal system and not in spite of it. It also helps that it is one of the Davis novels in which Falco over-reaches and finds himself distinctly out of his depth; he is one of the most attractive of historical detectives because he is not infallible. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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£11.21
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Arrow See Delphi and Die
<i>See Delphi and Die</i> is built, like several of Lindsay Davis' recent episodes of the adventures of her Roman private detective Falco, around the fact that the ancient world had a surprising number of versions of amenities we consider modern. Here, for example, we get the Roman tourist industry, with the newly rich and the old gentry buying package trips that might last for years, and that take them to the games at Olympia, to the oracle at Delphi and to the sights of Athens. When young women on these tours start turning up dead, Falco persuades the authorities to let him investigate. This is a classic whodunit as well as a Classical one--we get to know the tour party well and follow Falco and his wife Helena Justina as they piece together the inconsistencies and untruths in everyone's stories. <p>Like many of Lindsay Davis' books, <i>See Delphi and Die</i> is inventive in the twists and turns of its plot and includes one of the nastier last page twists of narrative she has ever imagined. The only real weakness here is that over seventeen books, Davis has built up a large cast of supporting characters and has to find in every book tasks for some of them to do, producing rather too many red herrings in the process. --<i>Roz Kaveney</i>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Shipping: refer to store website
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|
£5.59
at Amazon.co.uk
|
 |
Century The Accusers
Lindsey Davis's Falco thrillers normally focus on how like us the Romans were; <I>The Accusers</I> concentrates on an important difference. Prosecutors were rewarded with a portion of the guilty's goods, or fined to compensate the innocent. When a senator, found guilty in a corruption trial, apparently kills himself, Falco is hired to prove he was murdered because suicide nullifies the prosecution's financial claims. Only the question is: which of the late Metellus' heirs poisoned him, since almost all of them had more than one motive? Falco finds himself and his wife Helena caught up once again in the dark side of Roman high society and all the interesting ways in which it is contiguous with the busy life of sordid streets. <p>Davis's books are always at their best when Falco, as our viewpoint, is finding out something he does not know about how things work; this is a good detective story partly because of the exposition of the Roman legal system and not in spite of it. It also helps that it is one of the Davis novels in which Falco over-reaches and finds himself distinctly out of his depth; he is one of the most attractive of historical detectives because he is not infallible. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
Shipping: refer to store website
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£7.25
at Amazon.co.uk
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Century Scandal Takes a Holiday
The 16th of Lindsey Davis's fluent, funny Roman thrillers, <I>Scandal Takes a Holiday</I> puts official informer Falco to work searching for a missing journalist in the bustle of Rome's port, Ostia. As everyone keeps telling Falco, there are no pirates any more--the emperors put a stop to them for good--and yet somehow the old pirate havens of Illyria and Cilicia are just as prosperous as ever and rich, retired old men from both regions seem to fetch up in Ostia, along with gangsters, kidnappers and assassins. <p>The usual members of Falco's extended family are along for the investigation--the fact he has had to hire a seaside apartment does not escape those anxious to escape a Roman summer--and as always much of the book's charm comes from Falco's endless romance with his clever, posh wife Helena. This is also the book in which Falco finally meets the one uncle that no-one ever talks about; this is not one of the most profound of the Falco books (which can sometimes add seriousness and poignancy to their other virtues) but it is an entertaining and intelligent puzzle that, as always, tells us things we didn't know about Roman life. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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£10.99
at Amazon.co.uk
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Macmillan Shadows in Bronze
Pages: 354, Hardcover, Macmillan
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£17.98
at Amazon.co.uk
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Century Scandal Takes a Holiday
The 16th of Lindsey Davis's fluent, funny Roman thrillers, <I>Scandal Takes a Holiday</I> puts official informer Falco to work searching for a missing journalist in the bustle of Rome's port, Ostia. As everyone keeps telling Falco, there are no pirates any more--the emperors put a stop to them for good--and yet somehow the old pirate havens of Illyria and Cilicia are just as prosperous as ever and rich, retired old men from both regions seem to fetch up in Ostia, along with gangsters, kidnappers and assassins. <p>The usual members of Falco's extended family are along for the investigation--the fact he has had to hire a seaside apartment does not escape those anxious to escape a Roman summer--and as always much of the book's charm comes from Falco's endless romance with his clever, posh wife Helena. This is also the book in which Falco finally meets the one uncle that no-one ever talks about; this is not one of the most profound of the Falco books (which can sometimes add seriousness and poignancy to their other virtues) but it is an entertaining and intelligent puzzle that, as always, tells us things we didn't know about Roman life. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£16.14
at Amazon.co.uk
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Arrow Last Act in Palmyra
Pages: 416, Paperback, Arrow
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 5 to 7 days
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£5.59
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Arrow Two for the Lions
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. <p> 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.--<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
at Amazon.co.uk
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Arrow The Jupiter Myth Signed
Pages: 416, Hardcover, Arrow
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£5.59
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Arrow One Virgin Too Many
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 <I>Two For the Lions</I> won the Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger for historical thrillers. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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£5.59
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Arrow Falco on the Loose: Last Act in Palmyra, Time to Depart, A Dying Light in Corduba
Pages: 1008, Paperback, Arrow
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£8.57
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Arrow The Accusers
Pages: 400, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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Arrow The Silver Pigs
Pages: 318, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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Arrow Shadows in Bronze
Pages: 452, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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Arrow Time to Depart
Pages: 384, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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Arrow Ode to a Banker
Lindsey Davis's novels about the Roman informer Falco have always been ingenious in the way she sets up impeccably researched Imperial Roman equivalents of modern worlds and modern crimes. <I>Ode to a Banker</I> is one of the closest of her books to a classic traditional crime novel, in that it deals with a murder in a small enclosed world, with likely suspects whose motives have to be gone through by interrogation and legwork--the first of the bodies is even found in a library. Chrysippus was a banker and a publisher, owner of a minor scriptorium where not especially accurate copies of manuscripts are made by dictation; he is found with the centre rod from a scroll stuffed up his nose. Falco himself is momentarily a suspect--he had a row with Chrysippus who offered to vanity publish Falco's poems--but soon finds himself the official investigator, sub-contracting the job for his friends in the Watch. This is as elegantly picturesque in its portrait of the Emperor Vespasian's crowded metropolis as Davis has ever been; the soap opera of Falco's extended and disreputable family continues apace and amid all the snazzy puzzles, we get a real sense of a lively mind busy at work. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Arrow The Iron Hand of Mars
This, the fourth of Davis's thrillers about Falco, a private enquiry agent and informer in the Rome of Vespasian, takes him off to the wilds of Germany. Though most of the Falco books play with, and translate into Roman terms, the stock material of the hard-boiled crime novel--police corruption, serial killers, financial scams and women adventuresses no better than they should be--this one, like the first, <I>The Silver Pigs</I>, stretches the formula in a different direction; much of the time here, in true John Buchan fashion, Falco is running and hiding in hostile landscapes rather than down mean streets. It is only a few decades since the Romans had the worst of defeats in the Teutoburger forest, and barbarians on the border are keen to repeat the lesson. And in a tower on a river bend, there lives the most hostile of all Germans, the prophetess known as Velada, and Justinus, brother of Falco's upper-class lover Helena, has fallen in love with her. Packed with desperate adventures and comic incidents, this is not one of the most tightly plotted of Davis's books, but it is in many other respects one of the most enjoyable.--<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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£5.59
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Arrow The Course of Honour
Pages: 352, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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BBC Audiobooks The Silver Pigs: Starring Anton Lesser and Fritha Goodey (BBC Audio Collection: Crime)
Audio CD, BBC Audiobooks
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£6.63
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Arrow The Jupiter Myth
Pages: 352, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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Arrow Poseidon's Gold
Pages: 368, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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Century See Delphi and Die
<i>See Delphi and Die</i> is built, like several of Lindsay Davis' recent episodes of the adventures of her Roman private detective Falco, around the fact that the ancient world had a surprising number of versions of amenities we consider modern. Here, for example, we get the Roman tourist industry, with the newly rich and the old gentry buying package trips that might last for years, and that take them to the games at Olympia, to the oracle at Delphi and to the sights of Athens. When young women on these tours start turning up dead, Falco persuades the authorities to let him investigate. This is a classic whodunit as well as a Classical one--we get to know the tour party well and follow Falco and his wife Helena Justina as they piece together the inconsistencies and untruths in everyone's stories. <p>Like many of Lindsay Davis' books, <i>See Delphi and Die</i> is inventive in the twists and turns of its plot and includes one of the nastier last page twists of narrative she has ever imagined. The only real weakness here is that over seventeen books, Davis has built up a large cast of supporting characters and has to find in every book tasks for some of them to do, producing rather too many red herrings in the process. --<i>Roz Kaveney</i>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£11.87
at Amazon.co.uk
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Arrow Three Hands in the Fountain (The Falco Series)
Pages: 352, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
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Arrow A Body in the Bath House
It's a close-run thing. Two authors have made a speciality of brilliantly researched and highly atmospheric thrillers set in ancient Rome. Lindsey Davis is currently ahead on points, and the latest Falco thriller, <I>A Body in the Bath House</I>, is quite the most diverting entry in the series yet. Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder series will have to scrabble to maintain this level. The highly impressive sleight-of-hand that Davis is so adept at is just as much in evidence here as in such previous entries in the series as <I>Ode to a Banker</I>: while the sights, sound and smells of ancient Rome are conjured up with a truly pungent verisimilitude, Falco's modern sensibility never jars, and this Philip Marlowe of the ancient world remains a perfect conduit for the reader.<p> Cleverly extrapolating current fads, Davis demonstrates that even in AD 75 a passion for home improvement has gripped the Roman Empire. Falco is losing patience dealing with two cowboy builders who have been wreaking havoc on his bath house, but after the contract is finished, Falco and his father investigate hideous smells and find grisly human remains on the site. Simultaneously, in the primitive outpost of the Empire that is Britain, King Togidubnus is creating a spectacular new palace, but murderous accidents and corruption are bedevilling the project. Rome's Emperor Vespasian sends Falco to sort out the trouble, and this gives Falco a chance to escape from his dangerous feud with a Roman spy. Needless to say, as he penetrates to the heart of the mystery in Britain, his own life is (as usual) soon on the line with an implacable killer on his trail. <p> One would have thought that the law of diminishing returns would have kicked in by now, but this series goes from strength to strength. Taking up a Falco novel is an entrée into a world that is always colourful, always fascinating and always dangerous. --<I>Barry Forshaw</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
at Amazon.co.uk
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Arrow Scandal Takes a Holiday
The 16th of Lindsey Davis's fluent, funny Roman thrillers, <I>Scandal Takes a Holiday</I> puts official informer Falco to work searching for a missing journalist in the bustle of Rome's port, Ostia. As everyone keeps telling Falco, there are no pirates any more--the emperors put a stop to them for good--and yet somehow the old pirate havens of Illyria and Cilicia are just as prosperous as ever and rich, retired old men from both regions seem to fetch up in Ostia, along with gangsters, kidnappers and assassins. <p>The usual members of Falco's extended family are along for the investigation--the fact he has had to hire a seaside apartment does not escape those anxious to escape a Roman summer--and as always much of the book's charm comes from Falco's endless romance with his clever, posh wife Helena. This is also the book in which Falco finally meets the one uncle that no-one ever talks about; this is not one of the most profound of the Falco books (which can sometimes add seriousness and poignancy to their other virtues) but it is an entertaining and intelligent puzzle that, as always, tells us things we didn't know about Roman life. --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
|
|
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Shipping: refer to store website
|
|
£5.59
at Amazon.co.uk
|
 |
Century See Delphi and Die
<i>See Delphi and Die</i> is built, like several of Lindsay Davis' recent episodes of the adventures of her Roman private detective Falco, around the fact that the ancient world had a surprising number of versions of amenities we consider modern. Here, for example, we get the Roman tourist industry, with the newly rich and the old gentry buying package trips that might last for years, and that take them to the games at Olympia, to the oracle at Delphi and to the sights of Athens. When young women on these tours start turning up dead, Falco persuades the authorities to let him investigate. This is a classic whodunit as well as a Classical one--we get to know the tour party well and follow Falco and his wife Helena Justina as they piece together the inconsistencies and untruths in everyone's stories. <p>Like many of Lindsay Davis' books, <i>See Delphi and Die</i> is inventive in the twists and turns of its plot and includes one of the nastier last page twists of narrative she has ever imagined. The only real weakness here is that over seventeen books, Davis has built up a large cast of supporting characters and has to find in every book tasks for some of them to do, producing rather too many red herrings in the process. --<i>Roz Kaveney</i>
|
|
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
Shipping: refer to store website
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|
£10.99
at Amazon.co.uk
|
 |
Arrow A Dying Light in Corduba
Pages: 404, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
at Amazon.co.uk
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Arrow Venus in Copper
Pages: 320, Paperback, Arrow
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£5.59
at Amazon.co.uk
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BBC Audiobooks The Silver Pigs: Starring Anton Lesser and Fritha Goodey (BBC Audio Collection: Crime)
Audio Cassette, BBC Audiobooks
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£10.99
at Amazon.co.uk
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Arrow Falco on His Metal : Venus in Copper, The Iron Hand of Mars and Poseidon's Gold (3 title omnibus)
Pages: 1029, Paperback, Arrow
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£9.89
at Amazon.co.uk
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Century The Jupiter Myth (A Falco Mystery)
Pages: 352, Hardcover, Century
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
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£16.14
at Amazon.co.uk
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ISIS Audio Books One Virgin to Many
Audio Cassette, ISIS Audio Books
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Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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£39.94
at Amazon.co.uk
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ISIS Audio Books Two for the Lions: Complete & Unabridged (The Falco Series)
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. <p> 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.--<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
|
|
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
Shipping: refer to store website
|
|
£39.94
at Amazon.co.uk
|
 |
ISIS Gold Audio Books Venus in Copper
Audio Cassette, ISIS Gold Audio Books
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Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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£39.94
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