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Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire

Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire
By Ruth Downie

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Product Description

Gaius Petrius Ruso is a divorced and down-on his luck army doctor who has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia. His arrival in Deva (more commonly known as Chester, England) does little to improve his mood, and after a straight thirty six hour shift at the army hospital, he succumbs to a moment of weakness and rescues an injured slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner.
 
Now he has a new problem: a slave who won’t talk and can’t cook, and drags trouble in her wake. Before he knows it, Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. A few years earlier, after he rescued Emperor Trajan from an earthquake in Antioch, Ruso seemed headed for glory: now he’s living among heathens in a vermin-infested bachelor pad and must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer who may be after him next. 
 
Who are the true barbarians, the conquered or the conquerors? It’s up to Ruso—certainly the most likeable sleuth to come out of the Roman Empire—to discover the truth. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own.
 
Published in the UK as Medicus (Ruso) and the Disappearing Dancing Girls.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #332105 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-03-06
  • Released on: 2007-03-06
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 400 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The salacious underside of Roman-occupied Britain comes to life in Britisher Downie's debut. Gaius Petrius Ruso, a military medicus (or doctor), transfers to the 20th Legion in the remote Britannia port of Deva (now Chester) to start over after a ruinous divorce and his father's death. Things go downhill from there. His quarters are filthy and vermin-filled, and his superior at the hospital is a petty tyrant. Gaius rescues and buys an injured slave girl, Tilla, from her abusive master, but she refuses to talk, can't cook and costs more to keep than he can afford. Meanwhile, young women from the local bordello keep turning up dead, and nobody is interested in investigating. Gaius becomes a reluctant detective, but his sleuthing threatens to get him killed and leaves him scant time to work on the first-aid guide he's writing to help salvage his finances. Tilla plots her escape as she recovers from her injuries, and just when Ruso becomes attached to her, she runs away, complicating his personal life and his investigation. Downie's auspicious debut sparkles with beguiling characters and a vividly imagined evocation of a hazy frontier. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Fans of Alexander McCall Smith will delight in this series debut set in Roman-occupied Britain and featuring wry army doctor Gaius Petreius Ruso. Newly divorced and burdened with the debts of his late father, Ruso finds himself in a ramshackle military outpost with miserable weather and minimal supplies. Ruso's new job gets off to a rocky start when he's called upon to examine the corpse of a young woman who drowned. Then, after a long shift of tending to the sick, the cranky but charitable doctor rescues an injured slave girl from her sadistic owner. His good deed earns Ruso unwanted attention from a hospital administrator whose attempts to cover his bald spot are both desperate and hilarious. It also lands the medicus in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of two local barmaids. Through it all, Ruso wonders what has become of his life. Celebrated as a hero a few years before for rescuing Emperor Trajan from an earthquake, he's now sharing a residence with a doctor of questionable morals and a flurry of seemingly indestructible mice. A strong start for Downie, whose series joins those by Lindsay Davis and Stephen Saylor on the ancient Rome beat but adds a bit more humor to the mix of period detail and suspense. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"The real achievement here is the lavishly, often hilariously detailed portrayal of the world that absorbs Ruso’s exhausted wits and energies (Downie even manages a few good jokes about English cuisine). And in cheerful mutual insults exchanged between Ruso and his colleague and rival Valens, we hear again the effervescent voices of M*A*S*H’s Hawkeye and Trapper John. And Ruso is a wonderful character, fueled by a dyspeptic machismo and sullen charm reminiscent of Harrison Ford in his heyday. A charming novel." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
"It’s such a pleasure—because it’s such a rare experience—to come across a completely well done piece of commercial fiction. What a pro Ruth Downie is, and this is only her first book. I don’t know if she closely researched her story (set in Britain during the Roman occupation in the time of the emperor Trajan). I do know that everything about the story, its setting and its people seems compellingly real. Her protagonist, a Roman army doctor named Gaius Petreius Ruso, is likeable company. His adventures as an amateur sleuth, which begin when he autopsies a dead woman pulled from a nearby river, are drolly rendered. And his low-key romance—so low key that he’s the last to realize it is a romance—with a local woman who loathes her Roman overlords is both comic and touching at once. The highest praise I can offer this wonderfully entertaining portrait of the Roman Empire at its most far-flung is that I hope Downie is planning a series. Ruso is too good a character for just one book."--Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
 
“I loved this book.”—Scott Simon, NPR

“[A] lavishly, often hilariously detailed portrayal of the world that absorbs Ruso’s exhausted wits and energies. [He] is a wonderful character, fueled by a dyspeptic machismo and sullen charm reminiscent of Harrison Ford in his heyday. A charming novel.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The highest praise I can offer this wonderfully entertaining portrait of the Roman Empire at its most far-flung is that I hope Downie is planning a series. Ruso is too good a character for just one book.”—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

Customer Reviews

Fresh and Funny4
I thoroughly enjoyed Ruth Downie's debut novel about a Roman doctor on the edges of the Empire in Roman Brittania. The book is the first in a promised series. Our doc, Ruso, who's really from Gaul, not Rome, finds life away from the imperial center to be difficult in every regard - bad food, bad clothes, and bad wine - not to mention the weather and the natives. He went to Brittania to get a fresh start after a divorce and the death of his father, but Ruso's halting good intentions keep dragging him into deeper trouble as women from a local bar/brothel keep disappearing - or worse.

The Romans did indeed have a well-developed bureaucracy and they brought it with them, including its myriad regulations and record-keeping. With bureaucracy comes bureaucrats and his problems with his chief administrator are nonstop.

Fresh and wryly funny; Downie wields a lighter touch than Steven Saylor, not as polished, but not as worn either. Highly recommended.


An Auspicious Start5
This reviewer, for one, hopes to hear more from Ruth Downie. Her first novel, "Medicus," is a pleasing tale set in Britain during the heyday of Roman occupation.

The plot, itself, is a bit predictable but workmanlike. Character delineation is strong, particularly in the persona of her protagonist, the ever-harried medicus of the XX Legion, Gaius Petreius Ruso. Downie is a perceptive observor (and chronicler) of male perspectives. Her artistry is in conveying through Ruso some male traits and thoughts that are universal and timeless.

Where Downie also shines is in her uncanny ability to evoke the atmosphere of an era and place that we really know relatively little about. She uses the facts that we do know about Britain in the second century to bring us the "feel" of the time and place.

Overall, an elegant and pleasing novel.

A thoroughly enjoyable historical mystery5
I'm not crazy about cozies, which this novel is (most of the violence and all the sex take place offstage), but the main character, Gaius Petreius Ruso, is so engaging that I didn't want to stop reading. Ruso inhabits a vividly drawn world where the Roman army coexists uneasily with "conquered" Britons. A doctor at the legion hospital, he becomes an unwilling detective trying to find out more about the mysterious deaths of two bar girls. Along the way, he contends with situations that are very plausible, given the Romans' typical administrative efficiency: an upcoming imperial audit of the hospital's books, the need to get an advance against his pay, a supply room locked by the officious administrator, putting up his slave as collateral for a loan. Ruso maintains a sense of irony through it all, and you feel this man's inherent decency. Downie has done a great job with her first novel. I'm eager to see more from her.