She knew that he sent most of his money home to his brother, and she knew that it was never enough.” “As far as she had been able to work out, the medicus’s family lived in a fine house whose roof baked beneath the everlasting sunshine of southern Gaul, while its foundations stood in a deep and perilous pool of debt. As Tilla mused in the previous book, Terra Incognita: Analogously in this book, Ruso has been remembering his home through rosy glasses a vision dispelled almost as soon as he got there. When Ruso went to see Tilla’s home in the previous installment, Tilla found her memories didn’t quite live up to the new reality there. He knew he should have found a way to mention Tilla to his family before now, but he had not, and now she was “about to become a surprise.”
Ruso has been living with Tilla, a “Barbarian” from Britannia, for the past two years. He had the option to sign on again when he got back from Gaul, and Valens assured Ruso he would want to. (It was now June, and his contract with the Legion would be up in January. (Ancient Gaul included the area that is modern France.) He was granted a medical discharge. Come home, brother.” Since Ruso can’t do anything else for six weeks, he agreed, even though his home in the south of Gaul was over a thousand miles away from his current post in Deva. Since the author also highlights the food they eat, it seems inevitable, even without murder, that they would need a lot of fixing up.) Valens also delivered a letter to him marked urgent, that read “Lucius to Gaius.
#Ruth downie books series#
His friend and colleague Valens prescribed that he must go easy on it for a good six weeks, “and no wine, of course.” (Part of the fun of this series is learning about the various “cures” used by people in Ancient Rome. This book begins with hapless do-gooder Roman Army medic Gaius Petreius Ruso breaking his foot while trying to save a child who had been dropped into the river by five drunk legionaries. But the books are informative, funny, and entertaining, and I fully intend to keep reading the series.This is the third installment of an entertaining historical crime fiction series set in the Ancient Roman Empire. Moreover, the Ancient Roman Empire is a cruel and violent place, and Ruso is so often clueless he usually ends up on the wrong end of the stick. Altogether, Ruso was very unhappy, and stuck in a politically sensitive quagmire.Įvaluation: I am thoroughly enjoying the “adventures” of Ruso and Tilla, even though both of them are frustrating and prone to miscommunicating with one another. While Ruso was occupied with all of that, Tilla went to her former home, which was nearby, and met up again with her former boyfriend. Ruso said he would do his best, musing “he had a sloppy health service to shape up, a politically sensitive postmortem to carry out, and a deranged colleague. So in essence, Ruso needed to solve the crime. But the Prefect didn’t want the natives to think the man arrested was just a scapegoat, which would arouse their ire. The Prefect believed Thessalus was innocent but had gone insane, telling Ruso “we need to get him to withdraw his confession before anyone hears about it, and find out who told him how the victim was killed.” The Prefect intended to arrest a native believed actually to have committed the crime. The problem was that the regular medic, Thessalus, confessed to the murder. Ruso was to examine the body of Felix and write up his findings in a “politically correct” way.
Ruso had one more complicated job as well, regarding the recent murder of Felix, a soldier at the post. Ruso quickly discovered that “a country outpost serving six hundred men run in the same way as a legionary hospital serving five thousand.” And this was not a positive difference. When they arrived, Ruso found out that the regular medic was ill, so the fort Prefect assigned Ruso to fill in, and while he was at it, to get the infirmary in shape. She also claimed it was a beautiful area. Tilla came from the region around Ulucium and she wanted to visit her home. Ruso was persuaded to go in part because he was frustrated with his assignments in Deva, and in part because of his girlfriend, the former slave Tilla. “There’s a couple of centuries going up to help revamp the fort, fix their plumbing, and encourage the taxpayers.” Ruso explained to his best friend and colleague Valens:
Hapless Roman Army medic Gaius Petreius Ruso has volunteered to leave his post in Deva, where he has served the past eight months, and travel with a contingent of the army to the northern borders of Roman Britannia to a fort at Ulucium. This is the second installment of a historical crime fiction series set in the Ancient Roman Empire.
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