REVIEW OF LINDSEY DAVIS'
A BODY IN THE BATHHOUSE

By Benjamin Jones

Lindsey Davis brings ancient Rome to life in this humorous multiple murder mystery. The Roman Empire, that is. All starts with the discovery of a rotting corpse under the floor of a new bathhouse. Marcus Didius Falco, the bureaucrat hero of Davis’s series, finds the unfortunate fellow with his not-too-close father. An employee, he deduces, of the contractors who are bilking him. When the empire suspects fraud on the construction site of a new governor’s palace in Noviomagus Regnensis (now Chichester, England) Falco jumps at the chance to investigate. The signs are familiar to him. His sister is being stalked by a powerful rival of his, and so it becomes a family trip. Further complications follow, but the novel rolls on in a casual way. Falco’s first-person tone is gruff and cynical, but not rancid. And he speaks the wonderful line, “I am a Roman. We deplore barbarian cruelty- we prefer to invent our own.”