Just Finished Reading The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis

Lindsey Davis wrote a lengthy series of detective mystery novels...twenty in all...from 1989 to 2010.  What makes them special is the time and setting: imperial Rome during the reign of Emperor Vespasian and the detective, officially called an "informer", is an ex-soldier named Marcus Didius Falco.  In the first book, titled The Silver Pigs and which I just finished reading, Falco lives in a dingy, cramped apartment high in a Rome complex, harassed for rent by his crooked landlord's goons and almost as harassed by his overbearing mother living nearby, who periodically invades his apartment to drive out any of Falco's women guests she finds staying there.  He encounters a young woman who eventually leads him into a case of corruption, theft and smuggling of valuable metals (the "silver pigs"), and political assassination.  Along the way Falco goes back to his former, bitterly remembered battleground of Britain to investigate the case's trail and come up with suspects.  An intriguing romance forms as well, and the dialog is both cheeky and funny...the author has basically taken characters interacting like pulp fiction characters and placed them in an ancient, exotic culture with its own rules and customs...including, sadly, slavery as well as rigid social class distinctions.  She did an excellent job developing the characters, and after getting through story's climax and ending I'm looking forward to tackling the next book in her series.  Right now, though, I have two other reading projects ahead of me: John Steinbeck's East of Eden and Gilbert King's The Devil in the Grove...