Medicus, by Ruth Downie

This book is the beginning of a mystery series about a Roman doctor (medicus, in Latin) who joins the army to pay off family debts and lives in austere poverty while sending as much money home as possible to allow his siblings to keep the family farm and overcome the tangled debts of their father. It’s a compelling setup, as it shows Gaius Petreius Ruso as a divorced man on the loose trying to find ways to earn enough money while dealing with the situation in Deva (modern Chester), which is only at its beginnings as a town developing on the outside of a Roman fort. The situation portrayed in the novel is pretty compelling, with the British torn between wanting to profit off of connection to the Romans and still trying to overthrow them, and the mutual incomprehension between the Roman and native worlds being compounded by the province’s rather backwards air, lacking in civilization even as it does not lack in pretensions. If this is an unflattering portrayal of Britain, it is certainly one that is well-informed by its status as a backwards colonial area in a period where the Mediterranean world as well as Persia, India, Central Asia, and China were the apex of civilization at the time. The shady business going on all around the overworked doctor provides a suitable context for an accidental detective whose basic human decency leads him to investigate, however haltingly, a case of seemingly connected acts of violence, up to murder, in the local prostitute population of the town.

The plot of the novel itself is pretty enjoyable. The novel begins with the dead body of a mysterious woman who is found naked and with her red hair cut off, and from there we see Ruso go about his daily rounds as he appears to be the only person interested in the woman’s life and story. If he is initially reluctant to investigate the murder, he is prompted to think that no one deserves to die this way, and his interest in the lives of the ordinary Britons, including purchasing a slave who is beaten and has her arm broken, makes him the subject of considerable local gossip and interest. While he is slowly becoming a detective of sorts, he simultaneously seeks a vacant medical promotion which would earn him some much appreciated extra income and is also trying to write a book to earn some money that way. As one might imagine, this doctor finds himself overworked, with not enough sleep, not quite enough money to get by, and problems in all aspects of his life, including a nosy and bossy medical administrator at the hospital who is more than a little bit of a control freak trying to keep supplies and expenses under his own personal control. If the mystery isn’t too surprising to the reader, the interest that the writer has in showing family ties and the importance of identity and also of integrity and humanity is a welcome one.

Overall, this novel excels because of a few related gifts that the author–who apparently started her career as a novelist with this book–possesses to a high degree. For one, she has mastered the importance of characterization, which begins with little humorous touches in the list of characters at the very beginning of the novel, in the way that her hero is not portrayed as being superhuman in insight but simply willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, doggedly seeking to provide the dead and the living with the truth about what is going on, which leads to a dramatic and bloody ending that substantially shrinks the pool of characters who will serve as minor characters in the next novel of the series. The author’s commitment to giving her main character trouble, but also giving him the resources to get out of that trouble, at least to make it to the next problem, is a welcome one, and her skill in making this frontier world at the edge of civilization detailed and rich with gentle humor is a welcome one. This is a world you are going to want to spend time in if you appreciate murder mysteries with hints of political intrigue set in the world of Roman Britain at the beginning of the second century AD.