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Saturnalia is book 18 in a series, and my first, but it didn’t bother me any. I followed everything just fine. Perhaps the characters would have been richer if I’d been getting to know them progressively better for 18 books (!), but I found them rather well-drawn even in this one.

Our main man (and first-person narrator) is Marcus Didius Falco. He is employed as a “private informer”, which seems to be ancient Rome’s version of a private investigator (at least in Davis’s ancient Rome). He is called in by the government of Vespasian to try and recover an escaped political prisoner, a German woman named Veleda that Falco knew years ago; his brother-in-law Justinus, in fact, had something of a brief romance with her. Now, Veleda has gone missing, a headless corpse has been attributed to her, and in an especially personal twist, Justinus disappears at the same time. His wife is furious, thinking he’s off rekindling an old flame with Veleda. Falco is left searching for both of them – Veleda, for pay and for the sake of the empire (although in secret, as the public is unaware she’d been captured in the first place), and Justinus for the sake of family peace. Add to all this the bacchanalia of Saturnalia, the December holiday in which masters serve their slaves and everything is turned on it ear. Falco attends wild parties, hangs out in graveyards interrogating ghosts, does battle with the Chief Spy (a bumbling government employee with whom he apparently spars regularly), finds the odd lost dog… and carries on a very sweet relationship with his wife, Helena. I liked her addition to the story: she is from a social strata above Falco’s (her father is a senator), and routinely assists him in his investigations. Their relationship is well-done. She’s spunky, intelligent, not to be tamed, but also a doting wife; their home life feels very real and likeable, although I wonder if Helena is not a few centuries ahead of her time.

Which brings me to the historical question(s). I am no scholar of ancient Rome. This world felt real to me, and I was happy being immersed in it for the course of this book, but I cannot speak to the historical accuracy. It was great fun, but I make no promises.

This was a fun mystery. Falco has a great tongue-in-cheek, irreverent, dry humor, and the narrator of this audio version, Christian Rodska, represents that tone well. Saturnalia leans toward the ridiculous, with that straight face that makes such things all the more funny. The historical setting was new to me, but I had a good time with it.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: audio, historical fiction, mystery |