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| Persona Non Grata |
I finally got my hands on a copy of this book. I’ve been looking for it since I finished the last book in the series. Persona Non Grata is the third book to feature Gaius Petreius Ruso, a senior surgeon of the XXth legion and the wars in Britannia. In this book, Ruso answers a summons from home and the man who plans to take that family to court promptly drops dead in his home.
Downie has the same talent that my other favorite writers of historical fiction have: the ability to share historical detail without bogging down the narrative. It’s clear that Downie–a part time librarian–has done her homework. She even prints a short bibliography of sources at the end of the book. Roman history fascinates me. Their laws were complex and sophisticated, even if they could be surprisingly brutal. Every time I read about Rome, I wonder where we would be if Rome hadn’t fallen and the Dark Ages hadn’t happened.
One of the other things that drew me to this series is to see a possibility of how murders and other mysteries might be solved without anything like a police force or, in this case, without even thief takers. As in the other books, the investigation amounts to Ruso asking questions and trying to piece together what really happened. Also as in the other books, Ruso has the help of Tilla, a Briton who used to be a slave. Of course, her kind of help often works at cross purposes to what Ruso is up to and then spend about half of their conversations arguing with each other. The sparks of their relationship really help being this series to life and gives the main characters a lot of personality.
Along with her refusal to dump information on the reader, Downie also doesn’t over-write the books. It’s a pleasant challenge to piece together the world of this book from just the necessary adjectives and details. Compared with the last book I read, Leviathan, with its illustrations, it was wonderful to have to use my imagination again. This goes for the mystery as well. There are so few clues at first that it’s hard to see how Ruso’s going to solve it and find out who really murdered the slimy Severus.
Persona Non Grata is a wonderful escape book, with just enough challenge to it that it pulls you along–but not so much that you feel like you need a degree in criminal psychology and ten years experience in law enforcement to fathom what’s going on. The only problem I had with it was that I only took me a day to read it. I wish I could have spent more time with Ruso and Tilla.