Independent reviews for Double Identity.The Big Thrill feature on Double Identity.This is the first of a series, and I'll be reading more of them. The solution manages to be both fair and unexpected.
This is a fascinating look at Roman Britain, with engaging characters and a good mystery at the core of it. As they slowly learn to trust each other, Ruso learns more about the workings of this Roman British town than he wants to know, or is safe to know. Tilla is proud, independent, and has every intention of killing herself rather than working as a whore in a bar (her previous owner's plan for her). He keeps asking questions even when it's hurting his chances for promotion and making his working life more difficult. Ruso is cranky, impatient, and kind and generous despite himself and despite his circumstances. His life is further enlivened when the hospital administrator, who has been away, returns, and demands that Tilla be pledged as collateral for the large loan he's taken out from the thanksgiving fund, to help stave of bankruptcy at home. Ruso starts asking questions, and things start to happen-a burning brand through the window of his house, a trowel dropped from a rooftop and missing him only because Tilla saw it and pushed him out of the way-and his financial situation gets more and more complicated. He keeps hearing more than he wants to because, to get her out of the military hospital, he rents a room for the slave girl, who finally speaks enough to decide to go by the name Tilla, upstairs in the bar. While he's treating the girl and coaxing her to talk, he becomes not so much interested in as worried about the deaths of two bar girls, and the lack of any investigation into their deaths. He doesn't need to buy an injured slave girl to rescue her from her sadistic owner, especially when she's too injured to work, won't talk, and will cost more to feed than she's worth. Ruso has spent an unpleasant night examining the body of a dead woman fished out of the harbor, and then a long day on medical rounds. They have no servant to clean and cook for them, and their lodgings show it. In the meantime, he's sharing a mouse-infested with another army doctor and the previous owner's former dog, who has produced a litter of puppies. He's struggling to pay off his father's debts, with his brother at home in Gaul working to keep the real state of their finances quiet so that their efforts have time to work. Now he's divorced, his father has died leaving behind a mountain of debt, his brief notoriety is forgotten, and Trajan is dead. Not very long ago, he was married, a hero (he had saved the Emperor Trajan's life), and the elder son of a prosperous family in southern Gaul. Gaius Petrius Ruso is doctor serving with a Roman legion in Britain. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own. 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. 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. Before he knows it, Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. Now he has a new problem: a slave who won't talk, can't cook, and drags trouble in her wake. 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. 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.