Ode To A Banker: (Falco 12) - Softcover

Davis, Lindsey

4.01

2,578 ratings by Goodreads

9780099298205: Ode To A Banker: (Falco 12)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099298201 ISBN 13: 9780099298205

Publisher: Arrow, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In the long, hot Roman Summer of AD74, Marcus Didius Falco, private informer and spare-time poet, gives a reading for his family and friends. Things get out of hand as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who offers to publish Falco's work - a golden opportunity that rapidly palls. A visit to the Chrysippusscriptorium implicates him in a gruesome literary murder so when Petronius Longus, the over-worked vigiles enquiry chief, commissions him to investigate, Falco is forced to accept.

Lindsey Davis' twelfth novel wittily explores Roman publishing and banking, taking us from the jealousies of authorship and the mire of patronage, to the darker financial world, where default can have fatal consequences...

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Lindsey Davis's novels about the Roman informer Falco have always been ingenious in the way she sets up impeccably researched Imperial Roman equivalents of modern worlds and modern crimes. Ode to a Banker is one of the closest of her books to a classic traditional crime novel, in that it deals with a murder in a small enclosed world, with likely suspects whose motives have to be gone through by interrogation and legwork--the first of the bodies is even found in a library. Chrysippus was a banker and a publisher, owner of a minor scriptorium where not especially accurate copies of manuscripts are made by dictation; he is found with the centre rod from a scroll stuffed up his nose. Falco himself is momentarily a suspect--he had a row with Chrysippus who offered to vanity publish Falco's poems--but soon finds himself the official investigator, sub-contracting the job for his friends in the Watch. This is as elegantly picturesque in its portrait of the Emperor Vespasian's crowded metropolis as Davis has ever been; the soap opera of Falco's extended and disreputable family continues apace and amid all the snazzy puzzles, we get a real sense of a lively mind busy at work. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Davis's writing zings with fun" (Daily Mail)

"Every book in this series is a delight ... fans will snap it up, highly recommended" (Library Journal)

"Davies is a prolific and popular writer ... Her research has been assiduous and detailed, her commitment to the subject is impressive, and the background detail is often eye-opening." (Hilary Mantel Observer)

"One of the best of the current writers in this field" (Donna Leon The Times)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.