The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis Narrator: Christian Rodska
Series: Marcus Didius Falco #1
Published by Blackstone Audio on June 25, 2015 (first published August 5, 1989)
Source: Library
Genres: Historical Mystery
Length: 9 hrs 11 mins
Pages: 352
Format: Audiobook
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The Silver Pigs is the classic novel that introduced people around the world to Marcus Didius Falco, a private informer with a knack for trouble, a tendency for bad luck, and a frequently inconvenient drive for justice.
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.
I love a good detective novel – and this one just happens to take place in Ancient Rome. Marcus Didius Falco, a former legionnaire now returned from his tour of duty in Britannia and making a not great living as a “private informer,” doing what PIs always seem to be doing, working for suspicious spouses and shady businessmen and damsels in distress. The damsel here is Sosia Camillina a sixteen year-old who literally runs into Falco at the forum while she is trying to escape from kidnappers. He, of course, steps in to help and lands right in the middle of a conspiracy involving theft from the empire.
We’ve got mystery, murder, family squabbling, and a potential love interest (not Sosia, but her cousin Helena Justina who is divorced from her first husband). We also get transported to ancient Rome, but in a way that makes it accessible and interesting. We get snippets of historical events and learn what everyday life was like. And the mystery itself was well done and not overly complicated although it does take Falco some work to get to the reveal.
I listened to the audio and the narrator did a great job bringing Falco to life. He leans into the humor and witty dialogue and distinguished the characters well.
About Lindsey Davis
Lindsey Davis, historical novelist, was born in Birmingham, England in 1949. Having taken a degree in English literature at Oxford University (Lady Margaret Hall), she became a civil servant. She left the civil service after 13 years, and when a romantic novel she had written was runner up for the 1985 Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize, she decided to become a writer, writing at first romantic serials for the UK women’s magazine Woman’s Realm.
Her interest in history and archaeology led to her writing a historical novel about Vespasian and his lover Antonia Caenis (The Course of Honour), for which she couldn’t find a publisher. She tried again, and her first novel featuring the Roman “detective”, Marcus Didius Falco, The Silver Pigs, set in the same time period and published in 1989, was the start of her runaway success as a writer of historical whodunnits. A further nineteen Falco novels and Falco: The Official Companion have followed, as well as The Course of Honour, which was finally published in 1998. Rebels and Traitors, set in the period of the English Civil War, was published in September 2009. Davis has won many literary awards, and was honorary president of the Classical Association from 1997 to 1998.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
I’ve always meant to read this so am very glad you beat me to it! Also, I didn’t know there was an audio. I have only read one book by her, not part of that series, called Rebels and Traitors, which is set during the English Civil War. I don’t remember it all that well but I liked it a lot when reading it and hoped she would write more in the series.
This is the first book of hers I’ve read, but this series is like 20 books long, so I’ll probably get bored before I read them all.