17) Scandal Takes a Holiday, by Lindsey Davis

Well, this really was an improvement. Rather than drag in extraneous characters from real history, Davis introduces a few more of Falco’s extended and eccentric family. Of course we know right from the start that the journalist he is sent to Ostia to trace is probably dead, but there’s an entertaining chase through various other aspects of criminality in the environs of first-century Rome and some impressive misdirection of the reader by the author in her helpful maps and charts at the front of the book. Back on form, I think.