Started: 30 Jan. 2013
Finished: 5 Feb. 2013
Pages: 260
How to earn your living if you have a Classics degree? Write mysteries, apparently. Steven Saylor,
Lindsey Davis, Ruth Downie....all three have published multiple books that have meticulous attention to historical detail, while also being entertaining stories with convincing characters.
House of the Vestals is a book of short stories, each of which illustrates some aspect of Roman culture. For example, "Saturnalia Silver" is the story of an investigation that happens during the mid-winter festival, while "King Bee and Honey" involves a mysterious death linked to Roman bee-keeping practices.
How successful are they? Frankly, they felt a bit didactic. Because these stories are so short, the educational/informational content of each one seemed to overwhelm the character and the plot. But perhaps I'm not the best judge: in general I find short stories unsatisfying. They're over before I can really engage with the characters, and they're too short to investigate their themes very extensively. So I suppose I shouldn't single these out as being any less successful than the ordinary run of the genre.
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