Author

Lindsey Davis

Lindsey Davis
  • In Rome, ruled by the erratic Emperor Domitian, Flavia Albia is dragged into the worst sort of investigation―a politically charged murder.

    A man falls to his death from the Tarpeian Rock, which overlooks the forum from the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome. While it looks like a suicide, one witness swears that she saw it happen and that he was pushed. Normally, this would attract very little official notice, but this man happened to be in charge of organizing the imperial triumphs demanded by the emperor.

    The Emperor Domitian, autocratic and erratic, has decided that he deserves two triumphs for his so-called military victories. The triumphs are both controversial and difficult to stage because of the not-so-victorious circumstances that left them without treasure or captives to be paraded through the streets. Normally, the investigation would be under the auspices of her new husband, but, worried about his stamina following a long recovery, private informer Flavia Albia, daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, steps in.

    What a mistake that turns out to be. The deceased proves to have been none too popular with far too many others with much to gain from his death. With the date of the triumphs fast approaching, Flavia Albia must unravel a truly complex case of murder before danger shows up on her own doorstep.

  • A suspicious death that leads to a murder sends Flavia Albia down a twisted path to expose corruption, betrayal, and gang activity bubbling under the calm exterior of one the best areas of Rome.

    First-century Rome is not the quiet, orderly city that it pretends to be. and in this environment a very clever private informer can thrive. Flavia Albia, daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, is a chip off the old block. She has taken over his father’s old profession, and, like him, she occasionally lets her love of a good puzzle get in the way of her common sense. Such is the case when one such puzzle is brought to her by the very hostile ex-wife of Albia’s new husband.

    It seems that over on the Quirinal Hill, a naïve young girl, one Clodia Volumnia, has died, and there’s a suggestion that she was poisoned by a love potion. The local witch, Pandora, would have been the one to supply such a potion. Looking into the matter, Albia soon learns that Pandora carries on a trade in herbal beauty products while keeping hidden her much more dangerous connections.

    Albia soon discovers the young girl was a handful, and her so-called friends were not as friendly as they should have been. The supposedly sweet air of the Quirinal hides the smells of loose morality, casual betrayal, and even gangland conflict. When a friend of her own is murdered, things become serious, and Albia is determined to expose as much of this local sickness as she can—beginning with the truth about the death of little Clodia.

  • Intrigue—and possibly treason—swirl around the hall of power in Rome when yet another Nero pretender emerges to challenge the Emperor.

    In the year AD 90, following the Saturninus revolt in Germany, the Emperor Domitian has become more paranoid about traitors and dissenters around him. This leads to several senators and even provincial governors facing charges and being executed for supposed crimes of conspiracy and insulting the emperor. Wanting to root out all the supports of Saturninus from the Senate, one of Domitian’s men offers to hire Flavia Albia to do some intelligence work.

    Flavia Albia, daughter and chip off the old block of Marcus Didius Falco, would rather avoid any and all court intrigue, thank you very much. But she is in a bit of a bind. Her wedding is fast approaching, her fiancé is still recovering—slowly—from being hit by a lightning bolt, and she is the sole support of their household. So with more than a few reservations, she agrees to “investigate.”

    Adding to the confusion is yet another Nero pretender who has shown up in Parthia and is trying to rally support for his claim for the throne. With intrigue upon intrigue swirling around the capital city, it’s up to Albia to uncover what is—and isn’t—the real threat.

  • It’s AD 76 during the reign of Vespasian, and Marcus Didius Falco has achieved much in his life. He has joined the equestrian rank, allowing him to marry Helena Justina, the woman he has been keeping time with for the past few years. But that doesn’t mean all is quiet for Falco, Helena, and their two young daughters.

    By trade he is an informer, a man who looks into sticky situations, and he has been hired to pry his errant brother-in-law away from a murder investigation, which means Falco himself must take it on. To investigate the suspicious goings-on and the shady dealings of a fly-by-night travel agency connected to the case, Falco and his wife, Helena, travel to Olympia in Greece under the guise of being tourists interested in the classic sites. With two people already missing from the packaged tour, things only get stickier when two more—including Falco’s brother-in-law—disappear in what is Falco’s most complex and dangerous case yet.

  • Ancient Rome’s organized crime syndicates have never been more dangerous or more cunning than in this latest adventure featuring first-century sleuth Marcus Didius Falco.

    In the Italian town of Ostia outside Rome, Falco appears to be enjoying a relaxing holiday. But when Helena arrives carrying a batch of past issues of the Daily Gazette with the intention of catching up on the latest scandal, Falco is forced to admit his real reason for being there. “Infamia,” the pen name of the gossip columnist for the Daily Gazette, has gone missing, and his fellow scribes have employed Falco to bring him back from his drunken truancy.

    Before long, Falco’s inquiries lead him into the world of piracy and the discovery of criminal traditions long believed dead. Is this the path toward finding Infamia? Why would pirates have kidnapped him? And if they have, will he be found alive?

  • This novel in the acclaimed Marcus Didius Falco series finds the first-century detective confronting Roman legal forces that may just destroy him—and his family.

    Fresh from a trip to far-flung Londinium in Britain, Falco needs to reestablish his presence in Rome. A minor role in the trial of a senator entangles him in the machinations of two powerful lawyers. The senator is convicted but then dies, apparently by suicide. It may have been a legal move to protect his heirs; Falco is hired to prove it was murder.

    As he shows off his talents in the role of advocate, Falco exposes himself to a tangle of upper-class secrets and powerful elements in Rome’s legal hierarchy that may have unintended—if not fatal—consequences.

  • Marcus Didius Falco is about to get involved in a nasty noir crime, involving gangsters, gladiators, and romance.

    For Falco, a relaxed visit to his wife Helena’s relatives in Britain suddenly turns serious. He and his family are staying in London when Falco is summoned to the scene of a murder. The victim, Verovolcus, was a renegade with ties to Roman crime magnates operating in London, but he was also close to King Togidubnus. So when he is discovered dead, stuffed headfirst down a well, a tricky diplomatic situation develops that Falco must defuse.

    His investigation leads him into the seedy underbelly of London. There is a newly built amphitheater in town, one with female gladiators, but Falco soon realizes that the initially troublesome gladiators—including one from his own bachelor past—may just give him the edge he needs to solve Verovolcus’ murder as the gangsters are pursued back to the Italian town of Ostia for a final showdown.

  • The thirteenth novel featuring sleuth Marcus Didius Falco explores the fervor of home improvement that’s sweeping the Roman Empire and Falco’s own household, specifically the bathhouse—where a body turns up.

    Some things never change. With his new villa, Falco also gets a timeless headache: building contractors. After the departure of two shady plasterers, a rank odor in the bathhouse soon leads to the discovery of a corpse under the mosaic floor. Should Falco follow the culprits to remote Britannica? Despite the British weather (damp), the inhabitants (barbarians), and the wine (second-rate), Falco takes his whole family and goes. In veritas, Falco has another, secret reason for this exodus—his sister Maia has rejected the affection of a powerful Roman official, who vows brutal revenge. Now to protect those he loves, Falco must outrun an imperial enemy with a very long—and very deadly—reach.

  • Lindsey Davis is the internationally bestselling author who “makes Rome live” (Washington Post Book World). Funny, astute, and hard-boiled, her series detective, Marcus Didius Falco, now ventures into a new arena, the publishing world of AD 74, to prove that ars longa, vita brevis—and murder is timeless.

    Can a tough detective possess the soul of a poet? After a public reading brings him rousing applause, Falco receives an offer to have his work published. But his ego takes a beating when the banker Chrysippus demands payment for putting the verse on papyrus. Hell hath no fury like an author scorned, and when Chrysippus turns up murdered—in the library, no less—it’s poetic justice. Appointed the official investigator, Falco’s soon up to his stylus in outraged writers and shifty bankers. Now it’s time to employ his real talents: deducing the killer from an assembly of suspects.

    This classic whodunit is Lindsey Davis’ most satisfying mystery yet.

  • International bestselling author Lindsey Davis has done in the mystery genre what Caesar did in Gaul: came, saw, and conquered! Her innovative series put hard-boiled detective Marcus Didius Falco, “the Sam Spade of ancient Rome” (Publishers Weekly), on the mean streets of the Eternal City. Now Davis returns to AD 74 with a riveting investigation into a missing child.

    Men are fools for love. And that includes Marcus Didius Falco. To please his beloved, the tough shamus has become Procurer of the Sacred Poultry (i.e., babysitter of the temple geese). It’s steady work and good pay, but Falco is soon restless. So when a beautiful child, chosen to enter the secret order of Vestal Virgins, disappears, he grabs the case. He quickly discovers that greed and religious fervor are only a thread away from madness. And a little girl’s life may be cut short, not by Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, but by a sinister human hand—unless Falco finds her in time.

  • Rome, August AD 89. Flavia Albia, the daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, has taken up her father’s former profession as an informer. On a typical day, it’s small cases—cheating spouses, employees dipping into the till—but this isn’t a typical day. Her beloved, the plebeian Manlius Faustus, has recently moved in and decided that they should get married in a big, showy ceremony as part of beginning a proper domestic life together. Also, his contracting firm has been renovating a run-down building, a bar called the Garden of the Hesperides, where they uncover human remains buried in the backyard. For years there had been rumors that the previous owner of the bar, now deceased, killed a barmaid, and these are presumably her remains. In the choice between planning a big wedding to-do and looking into a crime from long ago, Albia would much rather investigate a possible murder—or murders, as more and more remains are uncovered, revealing that something truly horrible has been going on at the Hesperides.

    As Albia gets closer to the truth behind the bodies in the backyard, her investigation has put her in the crosshairs—which might be the only way she’ll get out of the wedding preparations and away from all her relatives who are so very anxious to help out.

  • This tenth novel featuring Marcus Didius Falco puts the tough private eye in the lions’ den to investigate an extraordinary case of murder.

    Nothing’s certain except death and taxes. Catching tax evaders for the Emperor Vespasian looks like a plum position for Marcus Didius Falco, who has teamed up with his old boss, Anacrites, the crotchety chief spy of Rome. Soon, however, Falco is bogged down in bureaucracy, stuck at his stylus, and longing for a good murder to investigate.

    He gets one when someone kills the lion Leonidas, the Empire’s official executioner. Feared by plebeians and citizens alike, Leonidas administered justice with a swift, sure blow. Then he ate the offender. Now this king of beasts lies stabbed to death in his cage.

    Sniffing around for clues, Falco is soon led into the rowdy, decadent world of gladiators and bestiarii, fighters who specialize in contests against animals. Falco finds that it’s dark and dangerous in the tunnels under the arena—and even blacker in the desperate souls of those who must kill or be killed each time the games begin. Yet no one has a motive for slaughtering a lion after hours.

    The unexpected slaying of the most glamorous gladiator in the city is another matter.

    Now Falco has a high-profile crime to handle—and a domestic crisis brewing. His lover, the patrician Helena, reports that her disgraced brother needs help in Tripoli. Since Africa may well be the missing link between the murders of man and beast, Falco is quickly en route to those far shores … and heading toward a dangerous rendezvous with the raging lions that reside in the human heart, and one particular person who stalks his fellow man.

  • In this eighth mystery featuring hard-boiled Roman PI Marcus Didius Falco, Davis creates a chiaroscuro world of evil plots and dark humor, as olive oil whets a villain’s appetite for power and his taste for murder.

    Surprisingly, nobody is poisoned at the Society of Olive Oil Producers banquet—the attempted murder of Rome’s chief spy occurs immediately afterward. Suspicion falls, quick as the Italian night, on the dinner’s sinuous dancer, a lady who has already left for Corduba, Spain. Naturally, Marcus Didius Falco, the Philip Marlowe of Roman detectives, is dispatched to follow her. But he has pledged to stay with Helena, his pregnant, patrician wife, until she gives birth. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, Falco makes what may be a fatal mistake: he brings Helena with him to a terra incognita of olives and intrigue, where a dies irae and a remorseless killer wait.

  • Balbinus Pius, the most notorious gangster in Emperor Vespasian’s Rome, has been convicted of a capital crime at last. A quirk of Roman law, however, allows citizens condemned to death “time to depart” and find exile outside the empire. Now, as every hoodlum in Rome scrambles to take over Balbinus’ operations, private eye Marcus Didius Falco has to deal with an unprecedented wave of crime—and the sneaking suspicion that Balbinus’ exile may not really be so permanent after all.

  • Last Act in Palmyra is the sixth book in the bestselling Falco series by Lindsey Davis.

    The spirit of adventure calls Marcus Didius Falco on a new spying mission for Emperor Vespasian to the untamed East. He picks up extra fees from his old friend Thalia the snake dancer as he searches for Sophrona, her lost water organist. With the chief spy Anacrites paying his fare, Falco knows anything can go wrong.

    A dangerous brush with the brother, the sinister ruler of Nabataean Petra, sends Falco and his girlfriend Helena on a hasty camel ride to Syria. They join a traveling theater group, which keeps losing members in non-accidental drownings. The bad acting and poor audiences are almost as bad as the desert and its scorpions—then as the killer hovers, Falco tries to write a play.

  • After six months in wild Germania, imperial gumshoe Marcus Didius Falco is back in Rome sweet Rome—but his apartment has been ransacked. And although he desperately needs 400,000 sesterces in order to marry his aristocratic love, Helena, his only client is his mother, who insists that he find out whether the scandalous claims against his dead brother, Festus, are true.

    Then the chief tarnisher of Festus’ good name is murdered, and Marcus becomes the prime suspect. Someone is definitely fiddling with the scales of justice. The more Marcus hunts for the thread that will lead him out of this doom-laden labyrinth of misery and mystery, the less his life is worth—except, as seems likely, as a meal for the emperor’s hungry lions.

  • When Germanic troops in the service of the empire begin to rebel, and a Roman general disappears, Emperor Vespasian turns to the one man he can trust: Marcus Didius Falco, a private informer whose rates are low enough that even the stingy Vespasian is willing to pay them.

    To Falco, an undercover tour of Germany is an assignment from Hades. On a journey that only a stoic could survive, Falco meets with disarray, torture, and murder. His one hope: in the northern forest lives a powerful Druid priestess who perhaps can be persuaded to cease her anti-Rome activities and work for peace—which Falco is eagerly hoping for as, back in Rome, Titus Caesar is busy trying to make time with Helena Justina, a senator’s daughter and Falco’s girlfriend.

  • Rome, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco is desperate to leave the notorious Lautumiae prison—though being bailed out by his mother is a slight indignity.

    Things go from bad to worse when a group of nouveau riche ex-slaves hire him to outwit a fortune-hunting redhead, whose husbands have a habit of dying accidentally, leaving him up against a female contortionist, her extra-friendly snake, indigestible cakes, and rent racketeers. All the while Falco tries to lure Helena Justina to live with him, a dangerous proposition given the notorious instability of Roman real estate. In a case of murder as complicated as he ever faced, Falco is at his very finest.

  • It’s the first century AD, and Marcus Didius Falco, ancient Rome’s favorite son and sometimes palace spy, has just been dealt a lousy blow from the gods: the beautiful, high-born Helena Justina has left him in the dust. So when the Emperor Vespasian calls upon him to investigate an act of treason, Falco is more than ready for a distraction. Disguised as an idle vacationer in the company of his best friend Petronius, Falco travels from the Isle of Capreae to Neapolis and all the way to the great city of Pompeii … where a whole new series of Herculean events—involving yet another conspiracy and a fateful meeting with his beloved Helena—is about to erupt.

    Lindsey Davis’ Shadows in Bronze is historical mystery at its best.

  • In the first century AD, during Domitian’s reign, Flavia Albia is ready for a short break from her family. So, in July, she returns to Rome, leaving them at their place on the coast. Albia, daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, who is now retired as private informer, has taken up her father’s former profession, and it’s time to get back to work. The first order of business, however, is the corpse found in a chest sent as part of a large lot to be sold by the Falco family auction house. As the senior family representative in Rome, it falls upon Albia to find out who, why, and by whom.

    At the same time, her potential suitor, Faustus, comes looking for help with his friend Sextus’ political campaign. Between the auction business and Roman politics, it’s not quite clear which is more underhanded. Both, however, are tied together by the mysterious body in the chest, and if Albia isn’t able to solve that mystery, it won’t be the only body to drop.

  • The Silver Pigs is the classic novel that introduced readers around the world to Marcus Didius Falco, a private informer with a knack for trouble, a tendency for bad luck, and a frequently inconvenient drive for justice.

    When Marcus Didius Falco encounters the young and very pretty Sosia Camillina in the Forum, he senses immediately that there is something amiss. When she confesses that she is fleeing for her life, Falco offers to help her and, in doing so, gets himself mixed up in a deadly plot involving stolen ingots, dangerous and dark political machinations, and, most hazardous of all, one Helena Justina—a brash, indomitable senator’s daughter connected to the very traitors that Falco has sworn to expose.

  • “There are rules for private informers accepting a new case. Never take on clients who cannot pay you. Never do favors for friends. Don’t work with relatives. If, like me, you are a woman, keep clear of men you find attractive.”

    “Will I never learn?”

    In ancient Rome, the number of slaves was far greater than that of free citizens. As a result, often the people Romans feared most were the “enemies at home,” the slaves under their own roofs. Because of this, Roman law decreed that if the head of a household was murdered at home, and the culprit wasn’t quickly discovered, his slaves—all of them, guilty or not—were presumed responsible and were put to death … without exception.

    When a couple is found dead in their own bedroom and their house burglarized, some of their household slaves know what is about to happen to them. They flee to the Temple of Ceres, which by tradition is respected as a haven for refugees. This is where Flavia Albia comes in. The authorities, under pressure from all sides, need a solution. Albia, a private informer like her father, Marcus Didius Falco, is asked to solve the murders.