Saylor is the, author of the Roma Sub Rosa mystery series featuring Gordianus the Finder in the waning days (First Century B.C.) of the Roman Republic. After completing twelve novels in the series, Saylor has elected to go back to the beginning and provide us with three prequels describing the adventures of the young Gordianus in The Seven Wonders and Raiders of the Nile (Egypt) and now Wrath of the Furies set in Ephesus, in the conquered eastern lands of Asia Minor. Gordianus, commfortably esconced with his slave mistress Bethesda in the house of Egyptian friends, receives a cryptic summons to rescue his former tutor, the poet Antipater of Sidon, trapped by his own folly in the murderous intrigues of the court of Mithridates, the self-styled King of Kings, who has wrested back Rome's eastern conquests and vowed to annihilate Rome and all Romans from the face of the earth. But before he can carry out this ethnic cleansing, Mithridates must propitiate the ancient Furies with a blood sacrifice.
Not Saylor's best work, but he does manage to work enough historical events and references into his story to give his readers a good look at the beauty and the savagry that existed side-by-side then, with oblique but unsettling comparisons to what still goes on in our suppposely more civilized age.
Click HERE to read the Kirkus Review of Wrath of the Furies.
No comments:
Post a Comment