Friday, September 23, 2016

Review: "Vita Brevis," Ruth Downie

Historical fiction review of Vita Brevis by Ruth Downie

By Paul Carrier

After working in the provinces as an army “medicus” and sometime sleuth over the course of six previous novels, Gaius Petreius Ruso now finds himself trying to make a go of it in imperial Rome, where he is newly arrived with his wife Tilla and their adopted infant daughter.

It's 123 A.D., and things are not going well for our jaded but conscientious hero.

Ruso lands a temporary job, complete with housing, by agreeing to fill in for a Doctor Kleitos, who supposedly has left town for a while to care for his father. But when Ruso and his family arrive at Kleitos’ combination home and office, the house has been picked clean of virtually all of its furnishings.

Not only that, but someone has left a sealed barrel outside, and the longer it sits there, the more flies it attracts. It turns out there’s a dead, naked man inside, and no one — least of all Ruso and his wife — has any idea who he is, who delivered him, or why.

Did Kleitos illegally order up a corpse for dissection, and then leave before taking possession of it? Why did he strip his house of most of his belongings if he's simply coping with a family emergency? Is the secretive man who periodically comes knocking at Ruso’s door seeking payment for the corpse? Or was the corpse a warning from debt collectors, prompting Kleitos to flee to escape a raft of overdue bills, never to return?

Kleitos left no forwarding address and no patient records. So when his paranoid patron, a wealthy landlord named Horatius Balbus, demands that Ruso refill the antidote that Balbus takes to counter any attempt to poison his food, Ruso whips up a seemingly harmless concoction that should deceive any would-be killers into believing Balbus remains well-supplied with "theriac."

Ruso delivers his "antidote," but Balbus dies after dining at another businessman’s home, so new questions arise. Did Curtius Cossus, an aged competitor who hopes to marry Balbus’ young daughter, poison him to clear the way? Perhaps an angry tenant did him in? Maybe Ruso inadvertently killed Balbus by accidentally adding something toxic to his bogus remedy? Or did Balbus simply miss his step while walking home, and crack his head? (We know from the outset that that last theory won’t prove true. This is a murder mystery after all.)

Publius Accius, Ruso’s former army commander in Britannia, also has his eye on Balbus’ daughter Horatia, who loves Accius. So Accius hires Ruso and a treacherous imperial agent to eliminate any competition for the fair Horatia's hand, by somehow proving that Cossus murdered Balbus. Whether that's true or not.

In the past, one of the things that set Downie’s Ruso series apart from many Roman mysteries is that Ruso found himself in Britannia or, in one novel, Gaul, rather than at the heart of the empire in Rome. Downie has abandoned far-flung locales in Vita Brevis (Latin for “life is short”) by sticking her protagonist in the imperial capital. But Ruso’s unique status in the popular Roman mystery genre remains intact, thanks to his wife.

Tilla is a former slave, a strong-willed woman, a midwife and a Briton. (Her proper name: Darlughdacha, of the Corionotatae tribe.) As such, she is bilingual and finds herself torn between her tribal roots and her new status as a proper Roman wife. She is somewhat disgusted by life in the big city. And thanks to her background, she is especially sensitive to the plight of the ubiquitous slaves who are such an integral part of Roman society.

When Tilla and Ruso set off to buy a household slave who can help care for their daughter, they end up purchasing three of them — one woman and two men —  because all three are Britons whom Tilla seeks to rescue. One of the slaves later runs off, but Ruso, sharing his house with three adult Britons and his daughter, muses fondly that he is surrounded by “barbarians.”

Amid the crime solving that lies at the heart of Vita Brevis, Downie offers up some entertaining semi-comic touches, as Ruso cares for various far-from-grateful patients and his upstairs neighbors hold clandestine but noisy religious celebrations to show their devotion to “Christos.”

By the time Vita Brevis draws to a close, Downie has managed to tie up multiple loose ends, providing a satisfying conclusion to another entertaining entry in her rewarding series. I have to confess that I did guess who was behind Balbus' murder before all was revealed. But that’s only because I happened to pick up on one subtle clue, which Downie snuck into the plot so neatly that I almost missed it.