A review by tessisreading2
Roman Blood by Steven Saylor

4.0

I was not expecting to enjoy this as much as I did: heavy on the history and the gritty underbelly of Rome but not exploitatively so. I love Lindsey Davis' Falco novels, but whenever they've addressed Roman slavery I have felt like they didn't do it well - I think Saylor did it very well, making it ubiquitous and accepted (even by his narrator/protagonist) while at the same time making it clear how awful it was, and how difficult life was for people at the bottom of the Roman social scale in general. These are much darker books than the Falco books. At the same time, the violence doesn't feel gratuitous and while the female characters are all decidedly secondary, they're well-drawn.