The Curse-Maker
A Mystery
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The Curse-Maker is the sequel to he award-winning Nox Dormienda, the first book of the Roman noir series created by Kelli Stanley (City of Dragons). Wedding impeccably researched history to prose and themes reminiscent of classic hard-boiled writers, The Curse-Maker is a thrilling and suspenseful journey into a dark corner of Roman Britain you've never seen before.
When Roman physician Arcturus and his stunning wife, Gwyna, arrive at Bath for a holiday, a dead body is floating in the sacred spring. It turns out that the murdered man is a curse-maker whose invocations actually come true, and as murder follows murder, it looks like there's now a curse on Arcturus.
This is an exciting and exotic story of a spa town where people go to heal...only to wind up dead. And it takes the doctor-investigator on a dark road -- into Roman cemeteries, silver mines, and underground water tunnels -- to comprehend the twisted mind of a killer bent on revenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A murder interrupts the holiday of Arcturus, the Roman governor's doctor and sometime sleuth, in Stanley's well-plotted second novel set in Britain during the reign of Domitian (after 2008's Nox Dormeinda, winner of the Bruce Alexander Award for Best Historical Mystery). When the strangled body of Rufus Bibax, a scribe who made his living writing curses, surfaces in a reservoir in Aquae Sulis (today's Bath), his mouth is stuffed with a piece of lead on which is inscribed Ultor ("The Avenger"). The physician learns of earlier mysterious deaths, which may be connected with the legend of a nearby mine. More murders, possibly by a copycat, follow. The author, as she explains in a note, has imaginatively reconstructed how curses might have been used in Roman society. Some may find the language too modern sounding ("Logically, she was right but goddamn it, I wasn't logical"), but all will wish this historical series a long life.
