By Paul Carrier
Well-traveled Roman gumshoe Marcus Didius Falco, who has served with the legions in Britannia and slogged through Germania on government business, hits the camel trails on the eastern fringes of the empire as a self-described “visiting flea on the rump of civilization” in Lindsey Davis’ sixth Falco mystery.
It’s 72 A.D. and the Emperor Vespasian, who has a habit of hiring Falco for dirty jobs requiring ingenuity and perseverance, has sent the detective to the independent kingdom of Nabataea (south of Syria) to reconnoiter for a possible Roman annexation.
That would be work enough, but Falco has a knack for multitasking. While he’s traipsing through the desert with his girlfriend, the high-born Helena Justina, and spying for the emperor, Falco also is on the lookout for Sophrona, a runaway musician who once worked at the Roman Circus for Falco’s snake dancing pal Thalia.
Of course, Last Act in Palmyra wouldn’t be much of a murder mystery without a murder (or two), and Falco and Justina stumble upon one in the Nabataean city of Petra. There, they find Heliodorus, a despised playwright, drowned in a cistern. When they report the discovery to the authorities, Falco’s cover is blown and he is booted out of town, with Musa, a local priest, in tow.
The itinerant actors for whom Heliodorus worked have been evicted as well, and Falco and Justina hook up with the troupe as it heads north to the Decapolis, a group of 10 Greek-speaking cities. Although Falco is pressed into service as a playwright en route, he and Justina assume the killer of Heliodorus is in their midst, so they try to figure out who committed the murder.
It’s 72 A.D. and the Emperor Vespasian, who has a habit of hiring Falco for dirty jobs requiring ingenuity and perseverance, has sent the detective to the independent kingdom of Nabataea (south of Syria) to reconnoiter for a possible Roman annexation.
That would be work enough, but Falco has a knack for multitasking. While he’s traipsing through the desert with his girlfriend, the high-born Helena Justina, and spying for the emperor, Falco also is on the lookout for Sophrona, a runaway musician who once worked at the Roman Circus for Falco’s snake dancing pal Thalia.
Of course, Last Act in Palmyra wouldn’t be much of a murder mystery without a murder (or two), and Falco and Justina stumble upon one in the Nabataean city of Petra. There, they find Heliodorus, a despised playwright, drowned in a cistern. When they report the discovery to the authorities, Falco’s cover is blown and he is booted out of town, with Musa, a local priest, in tow.
The itinerant actors for whom Heliodorus worked have been evicted as well, and Falco and Justina hook up with the troupe as it heads north to the Decapolis, a group of 10 Greek-speaking cities. Although Falco is pressed into service as a playwright en route, he and Justina assume the killer of Heliodorus is in their midst, so they try to figure out who committed the murder.
Predictably, the plot thickens. Musa, who may have caught a fleeting glimpse of the murderer as he made his escape, is pushed into a reservoir by an unknown assailant from the company of actors. Then Ione, a tambourine player who says she has pertinent information to share with Falco, is killed before she can divulge what she knows.
Davis offers a geography lesson amidst the murder and theatrics, as the acting company makes its way through the Decapolis, then north to Damascus and the Palmyra of the title. My copy of Last Act in Palmyra helpfully included a map of the region, without which it would have been hard to track the plot’s many locales, which are carefully - and humorously - described.
A case in point: Falco tells us the grasping metropolis of Damascus has “more liars, embezzlers and thieves among the stone-framed market stalls that packed its colorful grid of streets than any city I have ever visited . . . . Its colorful citizens practiced an astonishing variety of villainy. As a Roman I felt quite at home.”
Ever the wisenheimer, Falco’s witty repartee and sarcastic internal monologue keep the reader chuckling as the story unfolds. When Falco sets out to rent a room for himself and Helena, for example, he hopes to find “a basic roost that would be not too far from a bathhouse and not noticeably a brothel, where the landlord scratched his lice discreetly and the rent was small.”
The indecisive manager of the acting troupe, who likes to pass the buck by making decisions through consensus, “loved the fine idea of democracy, like most men who couldn’t organize an orgy with twenty bored gladiators in a women’s bathhouse on a hot Tuesday night.”
The motive for the murder of Heliodorus, once it is revealed, struck me as odd, but then even real-life people commit murder for all sorts of bizarre reasons. In any case, the killer gets his comeuppance in spectacular fashion as Last Act in Palmyra draws to a close.
The novels in the Falco series feature some recurring characters, such as Justina, but each book’s plot is self-contained. So although reading the series in order will make the experience more enjoyable, Davis fills in whatever backstory is necessary from one book to the next.
Davis offers a geography lesson amidst the murder and theatrics, as the acting company makes its way through the Decapolis, then north to Damascus and the Palmyra of the title. My copy of Last Act in Palmyra helpfully included a map of the region, without which it would have been hard to track the plot’s many locales, which are carefully - and humorously - described.
A case in point: Falco tells us the grasping metropolis of Damascus has “more liars, embezzlers and thieves among the stone-framed market stalls that packed its colorful grid of streets than any city I have ever visited . . . . Its colorful citizens practiced an astonishing variety of villainy. As a Roman I felt quite at home.”
Ever the wisenheimer, Falco’s witty repartee and sarcastic internal monologue keep the reader chuckling as the story unfolds. When Falco sets out to rent a room for himself and Helena, for example, he hopes to find “a basic roost that would be not too far from a bathhouse and not noticeably a brothel, where the landlord scratched his lice discreetly and the rent was small.”
The indecisive manager of the acting troupe, who likes to pass the buck by making decisions through consensus, “loved the fine idea of democracy, like most men who couldn’t organize an orgy with twenty bored gladiators in a women’s bathhouse on a hot Tuesday night.”
The motive for the murder of Heliodorus, once it is revealed, struck me as odd, but then even real-life people commit murder for all sorts of bizarre reasons. In any case, the killer gets his comeuppance in spectacular fashion as Last Act in Palmyra draws to a close.
The novels in the Falco series feature some recurring characters, such as Justina, but each book’s plot is self-contained. So although reading the series in order will make the experience more enjoyable, Davis fills in whatever backstory is necessary from one book to the next.
