He gets hired by advocates (ancient Roman lawyers) and orators to discover secrets and facts. Our narrator is Gordianus the Finder essentially, ancient Rome’s answer to Philip Marlowe. As such, there will be no salad, ear, et tu, Brute, or George Clooney 1990s-era haircut jokes found in this review. If you are more up on your Latin history than I am, the events found in this book transpire towards the end of the dictatorship of Sulla, who predates Julius Caesar for about thirty years (?).

Not that the characters know it’s B.C., obviously that comes later. This book, the first in the “Roma Sub Rosa” series (as titled by the author) takes place in approximately 80 B.C.

The series takes place in Ancient Rome – as I’m hoping all y’all could have figured out from the thumbnail of the cover up there. Now, I had read this … half? most? of this series back when I was in high school, and sporadically through college. Book 2 of the Five Book Backlog is Roman Blood by Steven Saylor. My French V AP teacher, scant knowledge of existentialism, and adoration of puns are all shaking their heads.)ĪNYWAY. Jean-Paul … Saturated Darks? Hell is other peoples’ laundry? I could not come up with anything. (I also can’t tell you how hard I struggled to turn that into a pun. Jean-Paul Sartre wasn’t kidding when he said that Hell was other people. It is your fucking responsibility to take care of your own shit and be goddamned respectful of other people’s time and space, so get the fuck back where you came from or so help me -Īhem. Because look guys, as much as I miss them days, I am not in college anymore, and I am not touching your laundry, regardless of how clean it is - or should be, seeing as how it would be coming out of a dryer. The first few paragraphs were full of my epic dryer rant and casting plagues upon the houses of the souls who take up dryers at a laundromat by only putting five pieces of clothing in said dryer (“it makes them dry quicker, there’s more air to move around!”) and then leaving the laundromat to run other errands, thereby holding the dryers hostage until they return. In a way, you guys are lucky I had started writing this review longhand while at the laundromat the other night.

Roman blood saylor