Showing results by author "Lindsey Davis"

Full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of the first five Falco novels by Lindsey Davis, starring Anton Lesser as Marcus Didius Falco.

Lindsey Davis drops by the Audible Studios to talk about her career as a historical novelist; how she develop her characters, how historically accurate are they, where her inspiration come from and more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's AD 76, during the reign of Vespasian, and Marcus Didius Falco has achieved much in his life. He's joined the equestrian rank, allowing him to marry Helena Justina, the woman he's been keeping time with 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's been hired to pry his errant brother-in-law away from a murder investigation.

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.

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.

Flavia Albia is the adopted daughter of Marcus Didius Falco and Helena Justina. From her mother, she learned how to blend in at all levels of society; from her father, she learned the tricks of their mutual professional trade. But her wits and (frequently) sharp tongue are hers alone. Now, working as a private informer in Rome during the reign of Domitian, Flavia has taken over her father’s old ramshackle digs at Fountain Court in the Surbura district, where she plies her trade with energy, determination, and the usual Falco luck.

First-century Rome is not the quiet, orderly city that it pretends to be. Over on the Quirinal Hill, a naive young girl has died, and there's a suggestion that she was poisoned by a love potion. Looking into the matter, Flavia Albia, daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, soon discovers the young girl was a handful, and her so-called friends were not as friendly as they should have been. When a friend of Albia's is murdered, things take an even more serious turn.

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.

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.

It is 73 AD in Ancient Rome and inimitable sleuth Marcus Didius Falco is back with a vengeance. In one night, a man is killed and Rome's Chief of Spies left for dead. Naturally there is no one except Falco to conduct the investigation. Soon he is plunged into the fiercely competitive world of olive oil production. Political intrigue, an exotic Spanish dancer and impending fatherhood, all add to Falco's troubles.

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.

From renowned author Lindsey Davis, creator of the much-loved character, Marcus Didius Falco and his friends and family, comes the second novel in her all-new series set in Ancient Rome. We first met Flavia Albia, Falco's feisty adopted daughter, in The Ides of April. Albia is a remarkable woman in what is very much a man's world: Young, widowed and fiercely independent, she lives alone on the Aventine Hill in Rome and makes a good living as a hired investigator.

Greece, home of the ancient Olympic Games, is a favourite destination for Seven Sights Travel, a seedy company which provides escorted tours for wealthy travellers. When Marcus Didius Falco and Helena hear that a young girl and a newly-wed woman, both Roman visitors, have been murdered at Olympia, they both step in to investigate.

Nothing's certain except death and taxes. Catching tax evaders for 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 Leonidas, the empire's official executioner.

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.

It's 76 A.D. during the reign of Vespasian and the Roman festival of Saturnalia is getting underway. The days are short; the nights are for wild parties. But not for "informer" Marcus Didius Falco. His job is to uncover unwelcome truths and deal with sensitive situations, frequently at the behest of the imperial government. So when a general's famous female conquest escapes from house arrest - leaving a horrendous murder in her wake - Falco is on the case.