Persona Non Grata - Book 36

These Medicus books are like potato chips to me right now.  Can't read just one!  Persona Non Grata is the third in the series.  Ruso breaks his foot trying to save a boy from drowning.  His term is almost up with the army and then he gets a letter from his brother that just says "come home."  So he and Tilla travel back to southern Gaul to see what's up.  Ruso's family consists of his step-mother, his two younger half-sisters, his younger brother Lucius and his wife Cass and their many children.  At his death, his father left the family in deep debt, and Ruso and Lucius have been struggling to save the family estate since then.  Now Lucius seems to have got them into deeper trouble.  He's got people trying to push him into bankruptcy.  Only it turns out that Lucius didn't send for Ruso to come home at all and Ruso's ex-wife has remarried, and his stepmother who ignores Tilla, has been thinking that if Ruso married the rich widow who lives next door, that would solve a lot of money problems.  Oh, and Claudia's husband, who was the one trying to ruin the family, shows up to confer with Ruso but then suddenly dies of poisoning.  Now Ruso is a suspect.  And I won't even go into the ship that sank that ruined a big investment of Claudia's father and how that ties into everything.

This was a complicated plot and I don't know if I understood it all.  But the pace was fast and there were some laugh out loud funny moments.  Downie does a great job of introducing the new religion that worships Christos, to comic effect and we get to go to the gladiator games, with Ruso as the surgeon who fixes up the wounded.  Pretty grisly stuff.  But not too bad.  The fact that Downie kept calling Christ 'Christos' (which is the accusative plural of the word, instead of Christus, which would have been proper Latin, bothered me.  Did she just like the look of 'Christos' or does that reflect more the Greek origin of the word?

Anyway, I enjoyed it and I"m already on the next book.  It is a nice form of escapism!

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