A Capitol Death (A Flavia Alba Novel #7), by Lindsey Davis

Reading this book is like having an enjoyable conversation with an old friend where one hears what she has been up to since you talked to her last.  A lot of that has to do with the skill of the author in having at its center an intelligent and hard-working and spunky woman in Flavia Albia and having suitable characters around her, like her loyal and patient husband, the manly Manlius, her clear-headed adoptive parents, her complex household of servants of one kind or another, and the other people of the city of Rome (and Ostia) that she interacts with through the course of the investigation, some of which show up over again (like Scorpus).  In this novel the author shows her careful knowledge and awareness of logistics and her fondness of giving credit to the often-forgotten and neglected people who never made the history books but who keep society running.  This sort of book is really the best example I can think of when it comes to works that deal with subjects that would normally be viewed as social justice but do not come off as being overly political, but rather the result of someone who writes who simply happens to be just and observant about the larger world than just the leaders who tend to be focused on in most accounts.

The plot itself is not terribly surprising and it deals with problems that have political ramifications but which are also intensely personal.  At its core, the book’s two murders show some serious hostility and bad blood between two small and fatally connected families.  First, Gabinus is found dead after having been suicided from the Arx hill, which has a bad reputation.  After that, Flavia Albia keeps on running into people who are not very forthcoming with the truth, including someone who is angry that their hut is being appropriated for an upcoming Triumph and that his mother has found a younger lover.  Meanwhile, an augur’s assistant seeks to help out his sister from her deadbeat husband.  The loose ends multiply and the case gets stuck until our informer finds a bosomy young woman who survived an attempted rape by the first dead person and who seeks to join her household as a maid and enjoy the city life, and untangles the connections between the dead people, and finds herself at risk as she solves the case, in danger from a violent and sadly incompetent killer.

There are at least a few aspects of this book that are deeply interesting.  For one, the author is able to blend personal and political concerns well while also writing about the importance of family, not only families of blood but also families of adoption.  Flavia Albia adds a dog as well as a maid to her growing family, and finds out the way that so many worlds are so small and so deeply interconnected, such that people end up living and working in the same places and going to the same dives and being too close for comfort when some of them are people whose behavior is loutish and crude.  This particular book ends with an abrupt conclusion, and suggests that there may be some interesting fallout for our protagonists given what happens, but the book’s sudden ending suggests that the author is less interested in tying up loose ends than in providing a compelling conclusion that also suggests that her characters are going to be deeply involved the politics of a highly divided Rome.  All of this suggests more interesting novels to read in the future, all of which is very good for this author’s many fans.