Death in the Ashes
A Fourth Case from the Notebooks of Pliny the Younger
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
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A few years after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, where he lost his adoptive father and mentor, Pliny the Younger is asked by his friend Aurelia to help her husband Calpurnius, who has been accused of murder in Naples. Pliny has solved previous crimes, but never before has so much time and distance elapsed before his arrival on the murder scene nor has he carried so much emotional baggage. With the help of his wisecracking sidekick Tacitus, he now must investigate cunning plots by some descendants of Augustus, which include murders and babies switched at birth. One fortunate circumstance in Pliny's detective activities is that the hardened ash crust makes good impressions of hand- and foot-prints. But now, for the first time, Pliny must swallow his phobias and ghastly memories and face a deadly challenge in the ruins of a buried villa
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in Rome in A.D. 84, Bell's solid fourth mystery featuring Pliny the Younger (after 2011's The Corpus Conundrum) finds the 23-year-old lawyer torn between his love for a slave woman and pleasing his mother, who has just arranged an advantageous marriage for him without his consent. An appeal from Aurelia, whom Pliny helped in the series' first entry, takes him to Naples, where Aurelia's husband is incarcerated for the stabbing murder of a freedwoman. Pliny faces an especially difficult case, since the accused was found literally red-handed, clutching the murder weapon, and has refused to utter a word in his defense. And the time passing between the crime and the investigator's arrival on the scene only further lessens the chances of his discovering something useful. Engaging characters compensate for a routine mystery, and Bell continues to make ancient Rome live and breathe.
