She brings Imperial Rome to life' Ellis Peters

I still can't believe I've put the bastard away for good!' Petro muttered. Petro Longus, captain of the Aventine watch, and Falco's oldest friend, has finally nailed one of Rome's top criminals. But under Roman law citizens cannot be imprisoned; instead they are allowed 'time to depart' from the Empire to go into permanent exile. One dark and gloomy dawn, Falco and Petro put the evil Balbinus aboard ship at the port of Ostia, thinking what it is the last they will ever hear of him. But soon the corpses start appearing: one of Petro's men who went with Balbinus is washed ashore dead and the informer who finally nailed the criminal is killed soon afterwards. It is obvious that Balbinus has returned and that once more he is running his criminal organisation. Petro and Falco must descend into the underworld of Vespasian's Rome to get their man.

I still can't believe I've put the bastard away for good!' Petro muttered. Petronius Longus, captain of the Aventine watch and Falco's oldest friend, has finally nailed one of Rome's top criminals. Under Roman law citizens are not imprisoned but are allowed 'time to depart' into exile outside the Empire. One dark and gloomy dawn Petro and Falco put the evil Balbinus aboard ship.
But soon after, an outbreak of robbery and murder suggest a new criminal ring has moved into Balbinus' territory. Petro and Falco must descend into the underworld of Vespasian's Rome to investigate...
'Non-stop action, excitement and astonishments - a real cracker' The Good Book Guide

'Absolutely smashing' Daily Telegraph

'Davis's writing zings with fun' Daily Mail

Lindsey Davis's first Falco novel, The Silver Pigs, was published in 1989. Since then, her novel Two For the Lions won the inaugural Ellis Peters Historical Dagger in 1998, and in 1999 she received the Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective for her creation, Marcus Didius Falco. Lindsey's last ten novels have all been Sunday Times hardback bestsellers. She was born in Birmingham but now lives in Greenwich.

2008-06-15 Falco No 7: in which Helena is expecting, and Falco is expecting trouble!

This is the seventh, and one of the most entertaining, in a series of excellent detective stories set in Vespasian's Roman Empire and featuring the informer Marcus Didius Falco. Informers in ancient Rome were something between a private detective and a government spy.

At the start of the book, in Autumn of 72 AD, Falco and his girlfriend Helena Justina have just arrived back in Rome after the mission to the middle east described in "Last Act in Palmyra" to find that Falco's friend Petro has finally managed to obtain the evidence required to get a prominent local crimelord sentenced to exile. They put the miscreant, the un-aptly namedd Balbinus Pius, on a boat at the Roman port of Ostia and hope to never see him again.

Also at the start of the book, Falco finds that Helena Justina is pregnant again, having miscarried their child in an earlier book. Falco wants to marry her, but to obtain the status to marry a senator's daughter he needs to obtain promotion from plebian rank (the lowest grade of freeborn Roman) to at least the equestrian (middle class) order, a promotion which Domitian Caesar has already refused.

But before he can get too concerned about this, people who were invovled in sending Balbinus into exile start turning up dead in suspiscious circumstances. Has he really gone - and can Falco and Petro find out who is killing the witnesses before he works round to them?

I initially tried this series because I had enjoyed the "Cadfael" mediaeval detective stories by Ellis Peters. Where Cadfael is excellent, Falco is brilliant. Ellis Peters herself (or to use her real name, Edith Pargeter) said of the early books of the series, 'Lindsey Davis continues her exploration of Vespasian's Rome and Marcus Didius Falco's Italy with the same wit and gusto that made "The Silver Pigs" such a dazzling debut and her rueful, self-deprecating hero so irresistibly likeable.'

Funny, exciting, and based on a painstaking effort to re-create the world of the early Roman empire between 70 and 76 AD.

If you have met and enjoyed either the Cadfael or Thraxas series, this is even better.

It isn't absolutely essential to read these stories in sequence, as the mysteries Falco is trying to solve are all self-contained stories and each book can stand on its own. Having said that, there is some ongoing development of characters and relationships and I think reading them in the right order does improve the experience.

The full Falco series, in chronological order, consists at the moment of:

The Silver Pigs
Shadows in Bronze
Venus in Copper
The Iron Hand of Mars
Poseidon's Gold
Last Act in Palmyra
Time to Depart
A Dying Light in Corduba
Three Hands in the Fountain
Two for the Lions
One Virgin Too Many
Ode to a Banker
A Body in the Bath house
The Jupiter Myth
The Accusers
Scandal taks a Holiday
See Delphi and Die
Saturnalia

I have read and can warmly recommend all of these. In addition, Lyndsey Davis has written another book in which one of the real historical characters who has a minor part in "Time to Depart" moves to centre stage.

"The Course of Honour" tells the tale of the love story between Vespasian and his mistress Caenis. Davis takes a person who is known to us only from two or three lines in Suetonius's "The Twelve Caesars" and from those lines creates a charming pen portrait living and vital woman and the love of her life.