| See Delphi and Die | | Date Created: Jul 31, 2005, 08:30 PM |
|
Doing some light vacation reading for a change! Whee! Except the new Lindsey Davis book in the Falco detective series, See Delphi and Die, is disappointing. Oh, it's an engaging enough story, but I had higher hopes.
Her detective character, Marcus Didius Falco, is a detective (well, 'informer') in 1st century Rome. Her characters are almost cartoon-like, with no attempt to take herself overly seriously as you'll find in Steve Saylor's series about Gordianus (set somewhat earlier). Yet her background research has always been impeccable. What I loved about the first few books in the series (apart from the tongue-in-cheek nods to Raymond Chandler) was the way that she was able to describe Rome from the inside -- a Rome that I recognized very well from my own studies of Paul's time there.
Hence the anticipation and disappointment with this book which sees Falco visiting two sites I've also thought about a lot: Corinth and Athens, perhaps only 20 years after Paul was there. She brought Rome to life for me, but I didn't really recognize either Greek city. And -- adding insult to injury -- she had one small scene, perhaps a page, in which a group of Christians appear on a Corinthian street, pestering one of her characters as street urchins might. Now I'm sure that the Corinthian Christians were quite capable of being annoying as anything, but not like that! |
|
|
|
