The Silver Pigs [Paperback]

I happen to love fictional history so this is a great match of mystery and history. I learned more about the Roman Empire under Vespesian than I've learned since college. And it wasn't just politics--- the book includes a good sense of everyday life. Did you know that urine was used as bleach?

There's also a dandy mystery with complicated webs of politics and greed and murder to be solved. Didius has a few missteps but ultimately has the moxy to unravel the tangled mess.

My only quibble is a modest one. I listened to the unabridged tapes. The narration is in first person, past tense which is ok. Unfortunately, the narrator has the voice of a fifty/sixty year old man. This made it a little hard to visualize a 29 year old Falco (particularly in some of the more romantic moments).

Bottom line - a series I'm eager to continue reading for the clever mystery plotting, the engaging main characters and the history lessons.

Lindsey Davis makes one critical mistake in this first outing, but it is nevertheless an engrossing and endearing book--and perhaps my favorite. Her hero, precariously poised between the lower and upper ranks of Imperial Roman society, is the perfect observer of the daily life of what the average person assumes was either a very dusty, dry existence or else extremely sensational, as in I, CLAUDIUS. The truth was probably somewhere in between, and we get it rendered in SILVER PIGS with a gritty realism and a charmingly anachronistic Sam Spade delivery that makes the novel humorous and unforgetable.

Falco has a number of problems in this book--not counting his demanding mother, irritating brothers-in-law, and not terribly hygenic nieces and nephews--the first of which is making ends meet. The fabric of his existence seems held together with cockroaches. It becomes increasingly hard to hold together after he befriends the niece of a Senator, who unwittingly holds the key to a dangerous secret.

It is with the character of Sosia that Davis makes her only significant mistake: Falco and the reader get so very attached to her that when, at the end of the first section, we are forced to part ways with her, it is tempting to put the book down in discouragement.

It is vital that you do not, for that would mean failing to meet Sosia's cousin Helena Justina, who changes everything for both Falco and the reader. The novel's pace picks up considerably after Falco is posted to Britain, of which he says sourly: "If your mapskin has grown ragged at the edges you will have lost it, in which case so much the better is all I can say."

The silver pigs of the title, by the way, are pigs of iron, laced with silver, mined in Britain, and the property of the Emperor. At least, that is the way it is supposed to be...