Death on the Tiber

By Lindsey Davis

Minotaur Books 2024

Death on the Tiber, the twelfth installment in the Flavia Albia series by Lindsey Davis, is a piece of historical fiction set in the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian. Flavia Albia first appeared in the 20-book Marus Didius Falco series by Davis, when Falco, Albia’s stepfather, adopted her and transplanted her from Britannia to Rome to start a new life. In her own series, Flavia Albia is all grown up and married to a man named Tiberius Faustus. She’s mostly followed in her father’s footsteps as an informer working alongside the vigiles, Rome’s embryonic police force, to solve crimes and unravel mysteries. 

Falco’s series lasted a long time and stretched over an entirely satisfying number of solid adventures. In those books, Falco himself was a tough-talking mongrel Sam Spade-type, hard-drinking during the day and mooning after a beautiful high-born woman whose class he for a long time couldn’t quite afford to join. The series gave repeat readers time to acclimate to the pleasing soup of anachronisms Davis cooked up: Falco spoke and lived in 1940s LA, only with no cars and even more people wearing robes and skipping basic hygiene. 

The Flavia Albia books are set in that same world, but she herself is devoid of both Falco’s rough charm and his even borderline believability. Of course the foremost obstacle to bonding with either series is the most basic of all: informers in the reign of Domitian were scummy monsters, not proximate PIs. But beyond that, Falco’s world of hidden knives and ready fists would have been entirely forbidden to Flavia Albia or any woman in ancient Roman times. 

Death on the Tiber worsens these things by scarcely even showing up to tell a story. A well-dressed woman’s corpse is fished out of the Tiber while Flavia Albia and her husband happen to be nearby, and the entire novel tries to rest its weight on Flavia’s completely random notion “I hated to think of his poor woman’s murder being ignored.” 

The coincidences pile up obediently after that, the foremost of which is that the woman in the Tiber turns out to have been a tourist murdered by a man named Florus, who just happens to have been the man who made Flavia Albia’s life in Britain a living hell all those years ago. So this time, as the saying goes, it’s personal. 

The tourism angle gives Davis opportunity not only for bit more anachronism (Rome did have tourists, but not like these) but also for some of the funny, pointed prose fans have been enjoying since 1989:

After these people had been led to lodgings, they complained about the room sizes and the smell of drains, then hired a guide, who took the job because it was the low season, so he was desperate. At least he knew they would believe any myth he invented and they would eat lunch at his cousin’s bar. He led them around the Flavian Amphitheatre, up to the golden Capitol and into the Imperial Palace with its tiring list of coloured marbles; every evening he shovelled them into more bars, where they were entertained by bare-bellied dancers and sold very nasty trinkets that fell apart in five minutes. 

Eventually, Flavia Albia and her entire sprawling family (the cast list is nine pages long) and Falco and his entire family are involved in searching for Florius in an attempt to solve the mystery of why this well-dressed woman ended up dead in the Tiber. According to Flavia Albia, who narrates the story, Falco and his old friend Petro, who’ve been searching for Florius for years, claim the hunt for themselves. “After all, they had been looking for him for more than ten years, call it fifteen, so clearly they were the boys for this job.” “In the end, it was me who found Florius,” she’s telling about five seconds later. “The old team had method, bravado and skill but I had luck and a good system in place.” 

It’s irrational to expect much from the twelfth book in any series. By that point, the author is either completely out of ideas or completely engaged in fan service, or both. Virtually no novel this late in any series can entertain serious hopes of inviting new readers. Surprises of a small variety are still possible; the last five pages of Death on the Tiber are genuinely low-key shocking. But the prospect of eight more novels of this thin gruel before the younger generation of daughters and nieces take over is already a little depressing – especially if the whole lot of them turn informer.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News