
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton
Date Published	07 April 2022

ISBN-10	1529354684
ISBN-13	978-1529354683
Format	hardcover
Pages	416
Price	£ 20.00

Desperate Undertaking

by Lindsey Davis

Rome, AD 89. Private informer Flavia Albia has picked up a case meant for her adoptive father, Falco. Someone with a nasty grudge against the theatre community is leaving bodies and messages in Rome’s Field of Mars. Nasty grudges, it seems, lead to even nastier murders …

Review

Rome, AD 89. The unstable Domitian is in power, and the city is rich in pickings for a private informer like Flavia Albia, who has followed in her adoptive father’s career choice footsteps. Vitally for this story, she also likes a good show, follows the classics, and goes to the theatre. Indeed, Falco, Flavia’s father, has dabbled in play-writing himself, making friends (and possibly enemies) in the gloriously overly dramatic theatrical world.

So it is to Falco that someone in need of help runs. However, he is sunning himself on the coast with the rest of the family, leaving Flavia in nominal charge of the family auction business and, it seems, the informing business, too. Falco is retired and informing is what Flavia now does, so she has no hesitation in picking up the case instead. And so the whole messy, gory, terrifying tale unfolds.

Someone is replicating bloody scenes from well-known plays, leaving a shocking trail of death and destruction. Someone with a mighty grudge against … someone. The motive is unknown. The only clue Flavia has is a dying victim’s last cryptic gasp, claiming that the undertaker did it. But no-one knows who the undertaker is.

This is the most violent of the Flavia Albia thrillers. Indeed, it is not so much grue-some, but grue-plentiful, and if grue means to shudder, then it comes very close to the mark. Grimly, gloriously, Lindsey Davis gives us rampaging aurochs, crucifixion, guzzling bears, chariot crashes and general action galore. It is fabulous. British born Flavia brings feminism to Rome with wit and admirably polite aggression. No-one is going steamroller this woman, whose razor-sharp brain and equally sharp tongue keep her ahead of the game and – mostly – out of physical trouble, but by no means always as she is too independent to be too careful of her own safety).

As always in a Lindsey Davis novel, there is a large and colourful cast of people and animals; from aediles to vigiles, from barmen to prostitutes, from musicians to set-builders, from faithful family hounds to yapping irritants. All of life in ancient Rome is deliciously set out on the page. Davis carefully and accurately draws a portrait of how the city was run, the streets become real, the action explosive, the politics, food and people are always believable and immediate. Read this book and relish it. It is sheer enjoyment.

Reviewed 25 June 2022 by Kerry Hood

Kerry Hood has worked in publishing for many years and lived in London for just as many, but suspects her heart is in the country.