tamaranth | 2023/097: Deadly Election

2023/097: Deadly Election — Lindsay Davis

I could have been married. I simply preferred to keep looking for a man whose habits and personality did not fill me with rage. [loc. 726]

Set in Rome in 89CE, this is the third in the Flavia Albia series, following The Ides of April and Enemies at Home. Albia is still not sure whether the aedile Manlius Faustus fancies her (she bemoans having found 'the last chaste man in Rome') but there's plenty to distract her: the candidates vying to be elected as aedile for the coming year, one of whom has enlisted Albia to dig up slander and sleaze on the others; four sisters all named Julia; their mother, noted in the character list as 'the mother-in-law from Hades'; a body in a stringbox (in July, in Rome: the smell is appalling); and a dog named Incitatus, who behaves very badly.

This is an engaging tale of corruption, rigged elections, family feuds, and women who -- even in the patriarchal society of Imperial Rome -- find their own routes to power. Julia Verecunda and her four daughters are all powerful women in different, and differingly unpleasant, ways. Albia, self-employed as an informer, is also perfectly capable of running an auction at the family auction house (whilst hoping that someone will bid for that pungent strongbox). In an era in which even wealthy women have few rights (see A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), Davis reveals the extent of matriarchal power, and how much of that power is the result of women being dismissed by men.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 08 JUN 2016, prompt 'copy a square' -- the square I copied is 'in a series'. I think there are about ten more Flavia Albia novels, and -- having enjoyed this one rather more than the previous two -- I shall gradually acquire and read them.