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Product Description
With safe seas, good roads, a common currency, and lots of interesting conquered territory, the Romans naturally invented tourism. They believed in a life of leisure and some would set off on their travels for maybe five years at a time. As these ancient culture vultures descended on the sights, the tour guide was born to cater to their needs.
Amazon Review
See Delphi and Die is built, like several of Lindsay Davis' recent episodes of the adventures of her Roman private detective Falco, around the fact that the ancient world had a surprising number of versions of amenities we consider modern. Here, for example, we get the Roman tourist industry, with the newly rich and the old gentry buying package trips that might last for years, and that take them to the games at Olympia, to the oracle at Delphi and to the sights of Athens. When young women on these tours start turning up dead, Falco persuades the authorities to let him investigate. This is a classic whodunit as well as a Classical one--we get to know the tour party well and follow Falco and his wife Helena Justina as they piece together the inconsistencies and untruths in everyone's stories.
Like many of Lindsay Davis' books, See Delphi and Die is inventive in the twists and turns of its plot and includes one of the nastier last page twists of narrative she has ever imagined. The only real weakness here is that over seventeen books, Davis has built up a large cast of supporting characters and has to find in every book tasks for some of them to do, producing rather too many red herrings in the process. --Roz Kaveney
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