Customer Reviews

See Delphi and Die: A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery (Marcus Didius Falco Mysteries)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Her books are funny and her characters are like old friends. It's hard to believe that the time these books are set in is around 75 AD. Her characters are Roman, and they travel around the world. Not only do we get a history lesson, but we also have a travelogue for Europe in this time. In this book, Falco and his wonderful wife Helena (as well as a few other hangers-on) travel to Greece to solve a mystery. Greece is the home of the Olympic Games and we learn quite about these very early games from the narrative in the book. Falco is on one of his most puzzling cases ever. He has to separate the natural deaths and accidents from the murders. He manages to straighten this out, but he still has no proof to charge his main suspect with the murders of a young married couple on holiday with Seven Sights Tourist company. We have the privilege of following Falco through the Greecian countryside as he tracks his killer. I highly recommend this series, and suggest that it be read in order. This is the eighteenth book in the series, so you'll have a wonderful reading journey to get through. Be prepared to laugh out loud many times as Ms. Davis' humour runs rampant through each book.

Falco always was at his best when traveling about, grouching about how the locals aren't up to Roman standards while admitting to himself that the Romans aren't really up to Roman standards either. This book probably also isn't up to Roman standards, but fortunately for us, it is up to Falco standards. That's good enough for me.

Falco and Helena (and Albia and Nux but not the children) are on a trip to Greece. A couple of young Roman women have died under mysterious circumstances while touring with Seven Sights, the shadiest operators you would ever want to meet. Somehow Aulus has become involved, so Helena's mother wants Falco to take care of things. Everyone on the tour is a suspect.

So much for the plot -- it's not bad but it's definitely not the high point of the book. The puppet strings are just a little bit too visible. The mystery is not compelling but neither is it completely pro forma. All the evidence is hidden in plain sight, and it was possible for the reader to figure it all out just about the same time that Falco did.

However, the cynical Falco dialogue is sparkling, and the characterization of Falco and Helena and their party is first rate. Davis seems to have found her voice again with the new, respectable Falco after struggling for several books while he made the transition into the landed gentry.

"Like most students, he was not at all surprised to find six people, some of whom he had never met before, fast asleep in his room. After the briefest of pauses, Gaius feigned an apology: 'Any friend of Uncle Marcus is ... an idiot.'"

The book is full of details about the grimy and sometimes slimy side of tourism, particularly tourism in a legendary but now backwater place like Roman-era Greece. The investigation starts in Olympia, moves to Corinth, then to Delphi, and finally to Athens. Along the way Davis plays tour guide, even as she lampoons the actual tour guides Falco et al. encounter.

Even better, the book is full of odd and offbeat characters, the kind that always made the older Falco books so amusing. From Olympic champions to incompetent poets to drunken philosophers and back to bemused Romans, Falco and the reader are treated to a menagery of funny, strange, annoying, but nevertheless real people. There is none of the grim desperation that some of the darker books have had, even though there are a few tense and scary moments. Instead we see Falco moving into a successful life as a mostly respectable upper middle class family man. He still has his Aventine roots intact, but he is finally comfortable with branching out from them.

After 16 previous books it is a little too much to ask for this one to be the best yet, but it's certainly in the top half.

This is the 17th (!) book in the amazing series about Didius Falco, an "informer" and sometime imperial agent in Rome circa 76AD. As usual, much of the book involves interactions between Falco, his wife, family and friends in the context of imperial Rome. This time we travel through various towns in Greece investigating two murders on two different foreign tours booked from Rome.

Each book can be read separately from the rest of the series, but ideally the reader will start at the beginning, Silver Pigs. It is important to not miss Two for the Lions, which resolves threads from earlier volumes.

The Silver Pigs (1989)
Shadows in Bronze (1990)
Venus in Copper (1991)
The Iron Hand of Mars (1992)
Poseidon's Gold (1993)
Last Act in Palmyra (1994)
Time to Depart (1995)
A Dying Light in Corduba (1996)
Three Hands in the Fountain (1997)
Two for the Lions (1998)
One Virgin Too Many (1999)
Ode to a Banker (2000)
A Body in the Bath House (2001)
The Jupiter Myth (2002)
The Accusers (2003)
Scandal Takes a Holiday (2004)
See Delphi and Die (2005)
Saturnalia (2007)

[...]

Davis has our middle aged family sleuth deciding to pursue a case in Greece based on a letter sent back home by Helena's brother, Aulus. The brutal murder at Olympia of Valeria Ventidia, newly-wed to Statianus and the decided lack of local government interest in the matter, coupled with the previous death of Caius Secundus' daughter, Marcella Caesia, on the Hill of Cronos, means our acerbic sleuth tries to hotfoot it off to Athens to track down the mystery killer but, instead, finds himself on the ancient version of the package holiday under the auspices of the Seven Sights tourist travel company headed by its unctuous salesman Polystratus and the chief guide, Phineas.
So, with Helena and their adopted daughter Alba, plus Glaucus, a bronzed would be athlete, son of Glaucus senior, and his two nephews, Gaius and Cornelius, Marcus heads off to Greece to track down the tourist party with its murdered member.
After visting Olympia (which is portrayed as resembling the aftermath of a music festival) and surviving an attack on his life whilst digging a little too deeply by Milo of Croton, they catch up with the party at Corinth and finally get to interview the tourist group (once authorised by the wet-behind-the-ears Aquillius Macer). There is Tiberius Sertorius Niger and his wife with two children, the middle-aged Helvia, the shabby Volcasius, Indus and Marinus, two old friends, Cleonyma and Cleonymus - the latter who ends up murdered fairly shortly afterwards - Minuca and Amaranthus and finally the recently deceased Turcianus Opimus.
After a meeting with the elusive and mysterious Philomela and catching up with the unctuous Phineas they hot foot to Delphi and Lebadeia to track down the mourning Statianus and Aulus, finding the latter in Athens after Helena tries her hardest to get killed by the oracle at Lebadeia and temporarily finding the former before he is also on the receiving end of a murder.
So, our slickly written and fast paced murder mystery has multiple murders with very little common thread for Marcus and Helena to puzzle through and we get a fitting denoument when we find the aunt of the first murdered girl and end up exercising a truly Tantalan stew as a gruesome climax.
Falco is not a terribly good traveller and it would be fair to say that the best Falco novels are those set in Rome. His unavoidable accumulation of familial clutter is also weighing his sleuthing down somewhat and sending him into the spiral of mental sleuth rather than action sleuth. I'm not convinced that Davis' choice to send him down this path is generating similar quality novels of as shown in earlier mysteries but I can understand the reality behind it. As ever, Falco is an enjoyable sleuth amongst an ever-expanding genre and well worth the time and money.
Buy it.

It always makes me happy to see a new Falco mystery. In fact I was somewhat surprised to realize that although this is the 17th case for Falco only about five or six years had passed in the Roman Empire.

Anyway, this one is definitely one of Davis' better efforts. While Falco had previously traveled outside of Rome on a number of adventures, this book is a great satire of travel tours-- both ancient and modern. I sympathized with Falco beating off guides at various historical sites and dealing with the odd assortment of people who seem to end up together in tour groups.

As for the narrator, Christian Rodska, he does a very believable Falco, a little coarse and tough, with a cynical outlook. However he is a sentimental pushover when it comes to those he loves.

If you have about 11 hours and 15 minutes of driving time (or house work time for that matter) then give this one a try.

For a good travelogue of Greece in the Roman era, this would be fine, as a novel--it's tedious. There's little mystery, hardly any menace, the wit is too caustic and nasty to be funny, and the characters seem lifeless.

I was bored throughout. Better luck next time.

While I don't think that the plot of this Marcus Didius Falco potboiler was the best of the series to date, the vast array of information presented the reader about First Century AD Rome and Greece is simply terrific. For example, here is a rarely presented account of tourism in the classic age as well as much intriguing information about the Olympic Games, albeit in the Roman period. The author, Lindsey Davis, is well acquainted with the subject of early travel, having sent Falco on the road many times before, but this book's setting in Greece is quite enjoyable on its own. Also always enjoyable is the interplay between the members of Falco's family. What's not to like?

In 76 A.D. widower Caesius Secundus hires informer Marcus Didius Falco to investigate the unsolved murder of his beloved daughter Marcella Caesius. She vanished while attending the 213th Olympic competition three years ago before her corpse was finally found. Officials assume the cold case will never be solved.

With the Olympic Games starting soon, Falco figures that is the best place to learn who abducted Marcella so he arranges a trip to Greece to attend the gala and begin his investigation. He takes his wife Helena with him, but leaves their young daughters (Julia and Favonia) with their grandmother; Falco also recruits his nephews Gaius and Cornelius, Albia the Brit, and Young Glaucus son of a trainer. Falco quickly learns that another young woman, Valeria Ventidia, violently died on a sightseeing expedition sponsored by the same party that Marcella went with, Seven Sights Travel. So he joins their tour as he thinks let the games begin.

The seventeenth Falco Ancient Rome (and now Greece) investigation is a terrific entry that uses the case to provide readers an incredible tour (Olympia is the fifth stop). Long time fans will appreciate the clever hero who still get distracted too easily and his brilliant wife who insures they stay focused. The inquiry turns personal when suddenly Gaius and Cornelius vanish in this wonderful whodunit that is part mystery and part historical novel and all entertainment with quite a final twist.

Harriet Klausner

Even Falco's wisecracks and his always eventful family life cannot disguise what is essentially a travelogue through Greece with attached mystery. This book reminded me of "Last Act in Palmyra" where we didn't miss a city of the Decapolis. I am a Falco fan, and I wish Lindsey Davis inspiration as she writes his next adventure. However, William Broad's recent book THE ORACLE, the search for the truth about the oracle of Delphi, is a better mystery by far.

Lindsey Davis is one of the few mystery writers that I regularly read. I am more interested in science fiction and non-fiction usually. But Davis' ability to describe the world of the Flavian emperors in the time of the first of these (Vespasian) is so good that you feel you are there in Rome or some far-flung part of the empire. You can smell the sea at Ostia and the delicacies of the fast food stalls in Rome itself or some backwater of the empire. The current work, "See Delphi and Die," is set in Greece 200 years after Rome conquered that home of democracy.

Marcus Didius Falco, together with his wife and partner the patrician Helena Justina have been asked by Helena's mother to look into the death of a young woman who was on a tour with her new husband. The couple of newlyweds were at Olympia, home of the Olympic Games of classical times when she goes missing and turns up dead. She was obviously murdered (with a jumping weight). Her husband is distraught and, despite the arguments that he had with her, is not suspected. Falco and Helena are left with a mystery, which is compounded by the earlier death of another young women near the same location and associated with the same tour group. The cast includes some young Romans who are with Falco and Helena , a homicidal athlete (who might have been the murderer), various tour guides, tourists, public officials and many others. The husband of the dead woman has gone off with Helena's brother, who happened by accident to be in the area at the time of the murder (hence his mother's interest), so initially Falco and Helena can only question the remaining tourists and eventually the tour guide, who all seem no help. As the pair have been kicked out of Olympia the interviews take place at Corinth. All this time the earlier death hangs over the current investigation like the ghost it is.

The tale spins on to the usually fascinating ending and I will not spoil the readers fun. If you like historical fiction and/or murder mysteries, you will love this book!