Last Rites

by David Wishart

Overview

'Right, ' I said. 'So what can I do for the Chief Vestal, pal?' The Axeman was flexing his hands like he was squeezing a couple of these wooden balls wrestlers use to strengthen their grip. 'I'm to take you to the Galba place, ' he said. 'There's been a death.' 'Fine, ' I said. 'You care to tell me whose?' 'One of the Ladies.' Shit. I sat back. One of the Ladies, eh? For Torquata's Axeman that could mean only one thing. The dead woman was a Vestal. Asked to investigate the death of a young woman during the closed-door rites of the Good Goddess, Corvinus knows he is on very sensitive ground. Particularly if it isn't murder. The sixth book in the Marcus Corvinus series

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781539895541
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	12/07/2016
Series:	Marcus Corvinus , #6
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

David Wishart was born in Arbroath in 1952. He studied Classics at Edinburgh University, and after a spell of teaching Latin and Greek in secondary school retrained as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, working for various companies in Kuwait, Greece and Saudi Arabia. He returned to Scotland in 1990, and lives in Carnoustie. His first book, 'I, Virgil' - a fictional 'autobiography' of the Roman poet -, was published in 1995; 'Ovid' - the first of the Marcus Corvinus series - followed a year later. Since then he has published a further 17 Corvinus books plus a novel-biography ('Nero') and a historical novel ('The Horse Coin') set in Roman Britain at the time of the Boudiccan revolt. His latest book, 'Foreign Bodies', was published in December 2015 by Severn House and he is currently working on his 19th.
He is married to Rona, who is head of Support for Learning at St Leonards School, and has two children and four grandchildren.

Editorial Reviews

Ancient Roman nobleman Marcus Valerius Corvinus is again pressed into unwilling service as a sleuth. This third in a series (Germanicus, p. 116) begins when the body of a Vestal Virgin named Cornelia is found, throat cut, after the nocturnal rite of the Good Goddess. Recently resettled in Rome, Marcus would rather stay home and banter with his tart-tongued bride Ruffia Perilla. But Senator Lucius Arruntius figures that the respectable Marcus will be able to question the "purple-stripers" (Roman officials, including the Vestals) without raising hackles and proceed discreetly enough to avoid public scandal. Suicide looks possible, even likely, until Marcus notices that the knife doesn't match the house's cutlery. And there's more frustration ahead: Among other witnesses/suspects, Cornelia's weepy maid Niobe, who found the body, seems to know more than she's telling. Evidently one of the Vestals, who opted out of the ceremony because of illness, was replaced by the vanished Thalia. With a little help from Perilla, Marcus theorizes that Cornelia may be pregnant, or that a male disguised as Thalia took her place. He finds a likely suspect in lovestruck young Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, son and namesake of the influential senator and brother of an oversexed divorcée named Lepida. But the deaths of Niobe and Lepidus, the latter an apparent suicide, return Marcus to square one. As before, Marcus' droll observations about Roman life and sexually charged repartee with Perilla are more entertaining than the shaggy, lukewarm whodunit.

Kirkus Reviews