You can see why they ditched the original title…

Britannia, 117AD, the furthest, coldest and wettest outcrop of the Roman Empire. Army doctor Gaius Petreius Ruso has taken up a new posting. It had seemed to be a good idea, but his vast debts are catching up with him. The hospital administrator is not helping matters, and not is the slave who he saved from being beaten by her former master and now is proving quite a handful.

When a barmaid’s body is found, Ruso  takes an interest but it is only when the second body appears that he decides that it needs looking into. Nobody else seems to particularly care – except from the murderer, who now has Ruso in his sights…

The month of history continues, with a completely and utterly new author to me – I checked this time and everything. Ruth Downie’s Medicus series was a recommendation from Sergio, my old blogging buddy. It was he who put me on to Paul Doherty once upon a time, so needless to say, I feel I can trust his recommendations.

I wonder – did he mean for me to start at the beginning of the series?

This is a well-written book, with some good core characters in Ruso and Tilla, and it makes a deliberate choice in writing style to include some more modern phrasing in the dialogue that would perhaps have been used at the time – “HQ” for example, or “trashy”, but I suppose you can make a case this is translated from Latin, so why not use modern English. Less convinced by the possibly-innocent Star Trek joke though – “I’m a doctor, not a fortune teller!”

But it falls foul of a couple of rules of the Doc-ologue, primarily Rule 9 – Don’t Hang Around. The crime aspect of the story is only one strand in a multitude of tales in the book, all of which eventually dovetail. And it’s a long book. I was enjoying the world building and the characters, but it did take too long for the story to coalesce.

And even then… the cover calls it a “crime” novel, and while we aren’t told who the killer is until late on, it’s hardly a surprise and most of the tale reads as a slow-burn thriller rather than a mystery. I thought about the similarly page-heavy books from Michael Jecks, but they are full of incident that relate to the main story. Here… too many of the distractions from the main plot just felt like that – distractions.

So, sorry, but while I can see why this is a good book, it wasn’t really for me. I might try a later book in the series at some point, but probably not soon.