Scandal Takes A Holiday
Lindsey Davis
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Mysterious Press
ISBN: 0892968125

In ancient Rome, Marcus Didius Falco follows the trail of a disappeared gossip columnist.

Lindsey Davis' 16th novel in the bestselling Marcus Didius Falco series is a tale of scandal, piracy & deception, with wisecracks, scathing social commentary & some nefarious adventures, to boot.

Our hero is relaxing on holiday at the prosperous port of Ostia, & when Helena, his longtime girlfriend, arrives carrying a batch of back copies (imagine the weight of all those wax tablets!) of the Daily Gazette -- with the intention of catching up on the latest scandals -- Falco is forced to admit his real reasons for being there.

“Infamia”, the pen name of the scribe who writes the gossip column for the Daily Gazette, is missing. His fellow scribes have hired Falco to find him & bring him back from his lazy, drunken truancy.

Falco suspects there is more to the gossip's absence. Before long, his enquiries lead him into the underworld of piracy & the discovery of criminal traditions long believed dead. Is this the right path to finding Infamia? Why would pirates have taken him? & if they have, will he be found alive?

Now, like every school kid of my day, I took Latin for what seemed an eon. Even got quite fluent, in my head, with reading Caesar's Gallic Wars. However, that was a long time ago. No, not the wars -- I mean my Latin classes! The Marcus Didius Falco mysteries are heavily salted with real Latin names for real Roman things & places, & I was reduced to whimpering for a glossary.

Still, Scandal Takes a Holiday is a charming jaunt into the past where detective work & social customs, religions & cults, myths & superstitions, & the dangerous political climate of the times come alive as our intrepid group search the bowels of a port with an ancient history, for one of Dan Rather's predecessors.

If you're a Roma-phile who enjoys an evening's mystery, or have been bewitched with Lindsey Davis' recreation of Roman life, then you're going to be hooked ... again.

More from Lindsey Davis:
Silver Pigs
A Body in the Bath House
The Accusers
The Jupiter Myth
The Course of Honor & many more!
(09/26/04)

Rebecca