Two for the Lions (The Tenth Marcus Didius Falco Novel)

Marcus Didius Falco, Lindsey Davis's clever, ambitious, not-so-holy Roman man about town, is on special assignment for the Emperor Vespacian. This time he's tracking down tax fraud among the bestiarii, the slaughterers, and the lanistae, the suppliers of the gladiators and animals who provide the executions, spectacles, and entertainment for the Roman masses. Hoisted by his own tarnished petard, Falco is unwillingly partnered with his ex-boss Anacrites, Rome's chief spy, but that's the least of his problems; his investigation has hardly begun when he finds himself in the tunnels under the arena with a lion named Leonidas--a man-killer who may or may not have been switched with a tamer beast for a private party meant to impress a wealthy Senator's mistress. While Leonidas presents no immediate threat to Falco--the king of the jungle is quite dead--the circumstances of the beast's demise lead Falco to ponder a connection between a murderous feud that seems to have broken out in the ranks of the lanistae and the lucrative contracts soon to be let by the emperor for his magnificent new amphitheater. And when the most popular gladiator in Rome is killed--not in the arena, as might be expected, but while sleeping in his own bed--Falco and his patrician lover Helena take passage to Tripoli to track down the perpetrator. Along the way, they attempt to solve a domestic crisis involving Helena's youngest brother, who seems to be right in the middle of the African connection between the murders of man and beast, as well as the feud between two powerful lanistae. And there's still another reason to embark on a journey to the Dark Continent--the search for an extinct variety of wild garlic, which could make Falco a wealthy man and which ends with a hilarious denouement. As usual, Davis serves up a generous helping of history, a raffish band of minor characters, a charming love story, and surprisingly relevant commentary on the nature of the bureaucracy, politics, and chicanery among the rich and famous. Two for the Lions promises--and delivers--a treat for the author's many fans, and a terrific introduction to his new ones. --Jane Adams From Publishers Weekly Talk about capital punishment: in the Rome of A.D. 73, top criminals are torn to pieces by a specially trained lion. And when that lion is himself found murdered with a spear, who better than Marcus Didius Falco, the Sam Spade of ancient Rome, to handle the case? Davis's 10th Falco adventure (after last year's Three Hands in the Fountain) has already won the first Ellis Peters/British Crime Writers award for a historical mystery, and should delight fans of her series. Newcomers, however, might occasionally wish that Falco weren't quite such a thorny character: like the cops on Law and Order, he seems to go out of his way to crack wise and to alienate partners and suspects alike. Working as a tax investigator with Anarcrites, a former chief spy for the emperor Vespasian, Falco calls his new associate "incompetent, devious and cheap." Falco's father, an antiquities dealer, is introduced as "the devious miser Didius Favonius"; his mother and sister are treated with equal scorn. Only Helena Justina, a senator's daughter, gets any respect from the cynical Falco: "She was neat, scathing, intelligent, wondrously unpredictable. I still could not believe my luck that she had even noticed me, let alone that she lived in my apartment, was the mother of my baby daughter, and had taken charge of my disorganized life." When he's not bad-mouthing most of Rome's population, Falco follows an increasingly tangled skein of clues to Greece and Tripoli, in search not only of the lion's killer but also of an elusive herb that sounds very much like garlic. As usual, Davis's research into the customs of the period is impeccable: it's only the excessively angst-ridden modernity of her lead character that occasionally rocks the read. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal In the latest Roman romp featuring Marcus Didius Falco, the hapless private eye is trying to earn a little money by working for the Census to track down tax evaders. Unfortunately, he is stuck with his nemesis, Anacrites, chief spy of Rome, as partner. Even worse, the lion who was set to dispatch the serial killer Falco captured in his last adventure, Three Hands in the Fountain, has been stabbed to death. Falco takes it personally and sets off to find the killer, which leads him into the Byzantine and bloody world of gladiatorial combat. Tension builds nicely until Falco hits a dead end and heads off to Cyrena?ca with his family. In terms of plot, there's finally a good reason for this detour, but it does make things sag a bit. Still, Davis is in fine form: the characterizations are terrific, the historical details are intriguing, and Falco is his rueful, wisecracking self. For all mystery collections. -ABarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Marcus Didius Falco may dress differently than Philip Marlowe, but the Roman sleuth in the dirty toga looks at corruption in the first century A.D. with the same world-weary cynicism that colored Marlowe's view of twentieth-century Los Angeles. In this latest Falco adventure, the freelance "informer" (sleuth, in Roman lingo) has a new gig: tax collector. Murder takes precedence, however, when Emperor Vespasian's executioner, a lion called Leonidas, is found dead. Falco follows the trail into the netherworld of gladiators and their handlers, called lanista . Meanwhile, Falco's patrician lover, Helena, must come to the aid of her black-sheep brother, who has run off to Tripoli, where the lanista buy their lions. Falco accompanies Helen to Africa, hoping to solve a family crisis and find a killer. Davis sticks closely to her successful formula here: a detail-rich scan of daily life in ancient Rome, a side trip to one of the Empire's outposts, and lots of beguiling Nick-and-Nora banter between Falco and Helena. It's worked before, and it works again. Bill Ott "With the passing of Ellis Peters, the title Queen of the Historical Whodunit is temporarily vacant. Lindsey Davis is well suited to assume it-and she is funnier than Peters....Davis's books make old Rome sound fun....It is all so enjoyable. -- Times, London LINDSEY DAVIS was born and raised in Birmingham, England. She read English at Oxford, then worked in government service. Her internationally bestselling series featuring Marcus Didius Falco earned her the Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library Award. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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 swingeingly 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 minimize 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 cozy 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 gray 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. © 1999 by Lindsey Davis Read more