Death in the Ashes: A Fourth Case from the Notebooks of Pliny the Younger

Set in Rome in A.D. 84, Bell’s solid fourth mystery featuring Pliny the Younger (after 2011’s The Corpus Conundrum) finds the 23-year-old lawyer torn between his love for a slave woman and pleasing his mother, who has just arranged an advantageous marriage for him without his consent. An appeal from Aurelia, whom Pliny helped in the series’ first entry, takes him to Naples, where Aurelia’s husband is incarcerated for the stabbing murder of a freedwoman. Pliny faces an especially difficult case, since the accused was found literally red-handed, clutching the murder weapon, and has refused to utter a word in his defense. And the time passing between the crime and the investigator’s arrival on the scene only further lessens the chances of his discovering something useful. Engaging characters compensate for a routine mystery, and Bell continues to make ancient Rome live and breathe. (Sept.)