Bøger af David Wishart

Seemingly, when he committed suicide by falling from a tenement window, young Sextus Papinus had everything to live for. So did he jump after all, or was he pushed? And if the second, whodunnit, and why? Corvinus finds his investigations hampered by a spot of compulsory dog-minding, and the fact that the dog in question is a hound from Hell with a zero score in the social graces doesn't help matters at all...The eleventh book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

I sat down on one of the couches. 'So, Stepfather, ' I said, 'Who did you kill?' 'He didn't kill anyone!' Mother snapped. 'Don't be silly!' I sighed. 'Okay. So who didn't you kill?' Back briefly to Italy from his self-imposed exile in Athens, Marcus Corvinus is not a happy bunny; particularly since he and his wife Perilla are sharing their holiday with Corvinus's mother and antiquities- obsessed stepfather Helvius Priscus. Then, when Priscus is caught standing over the corpse of one of the local landowners with the murder weapon in his hand, life suddenly becomes much more interesting... The fifth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

'Him and his fancy fish-farm, raking it in hand over fist. He's a bastard. A greedy bastard. Some people, they'd be better off dead, know what I mean?'Baiae, jewel of the Campanian coast and favourite playground of Rome's great and not-so-good. Gaius Trebbio, the town drunk, has every reason to hate his erstwhile landlord Licinius Murena, and when the man (or what's left of him) is found dead in one of his own conger-eel tanks Trebbio is the prime suspect. Not the only one, though: there's also Murena's widow, half his age with a penchant for young doctors, plus his daughter and put-upon farm manager. And that's only the start...The tenth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

'When you read this, Corvinus, both I and my wife Ennia will be dead, on the emperor's orders. What excuse he'll offer publicly or in private I don't know, but whatever it is it will be the product of misinformation and calumny.'When Marcus Corvinus is given a letter from Sertorius Macro, the Emperor Gaius's erstwhile adviser forced into suicide for plotting against him, asking him to clear the dead man's name, he isn't keen on the job at all: rifling through the political dirty laundry basket is currently just too damn dangerous. However, when the inconsistencies begin to mount up he is firmly hooked.The thirteenth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

When young aristocratic layabout Marcus Corvinus is approached by the stepdaughter of the exiled and now dead Roman poet Ovid and asked to clear the return of the ashes for burial, he cheerfully agrees; there should, he thinks, be no problem. Only when he makes the application to the imperial authorities it's turned down flat. So what, Corvinus asks himself, did Ovid do that was so bad that they won't even allow his bones back into Italy? The first book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

When the ex-praetor husband of a friend of Claudius's mother-in-law is found murdered on his estate near Carthage the emperor gives Corvinus the job of working out whodunnit. The twentieth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

'Right, ' I said. 'So what can I do for the Chief Vestal, pal?' The Axeman was flexing his hands like he was squeezing a couple of these wooden balls wrestlers use to strengthen their grip. 'I'm to take you to the Galba place, ' he said. 'There's been a death.' 'Fine, ' I said. 'You care to tell me whose?' 'One of the Ladies.' Shit. I sat back. One of the Ladies, eh? For Torquata's Axeman that could mean only one thing. The dead woman was a Vestal. Asked to investigate the death of a young woman during the closed-door rites of the Good Goddess, Corvinus knows he is on very sensitive ground. Particularly if it isn't murder. The sixth book in the Marcus Corvinus series

'It's a funny thing about holidays in the country, but after only a few days away you feel as if you've been out of circulation for a month...' Holidaying out in the sticks in the Alban Hills, Marcus Corvinus is bored out of his skull until, conveniently, one of the candidates for the position of local censor is found murdered. So who killed Bolanus? Can Corvinus find the murderer before the Latin Festival raises the stakes? How do the Latin Nationalists fit into the picture? And last but not least, what exactly is his chef Meton up to in the kitchen with Dassa the Sheep? Corvinus doesn't know any of the answers, either. The eighth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

'Ah, Corvinus.' Eutacticus was beaming. Bad sign; bad, bad sign. 'Glad you could make it. Sit down, boy. You had a good summer?'Oh, shit; small talk. With Eutacticus you never, ever got small talk. Forget bad; in terms of signs we were into fully-fledged omen territory here.'It was interesting, yeah, ' I said. 'We were away most of the time. We've just got back, in fact.''Excellent! So you won't have unpacked yet?''Ah...no, as it happens. We're planning to go down to Castrimoenium to see our adopted daughter and her family. They're-''Were planning.'I blinked. 'Come again?''You heard.' The smile broadened even more, revealing an incisor. 'Were planning. Past tense. You owe me and I'm calling in the favour. You're going to Brundisium.''What?''A little job I want you to do for me.'Deputed by crime boss Sempronius Eutacticus to investigate the murder of one of his 'colleagues', Corvinus finds himself mixing with the soured cream of Brundisium's criminal élite.The twenty-first book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

'We talked a little about Aelius Sejanus the last time we met. The fact that you are reading this shows that the time for talk is past. The man is a malignant growth, a danger to Rome, and he must be removed. No; I dislike euphemisms. Sejanus must be killed.' Back home temporarily for his father's funeral, Corvinus finds that he has been left a commission by the dead Empress Livia. The only drawback is that Sejanus is the Emperor Tiberius's trusted deputy, and the most powerful man in Rome.... The third book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

'I need a favour from you, Corvinus. Do what Occusia asks, and I'll be very grateful. Very grateful indeed. Turn her down, or fudge things, and - watch my lips here, please - you'll wish that you'd never been born. Your choice, absolutely no pressure. You understand?' Four years down the line, and Sempronius Eutacticus is still the charming, good-natured organized-crime boss that he was when they last met. Now his stepson has gone missing, and he wants Corvinus to trace him. Not that it should be difficult: young Titus has simply run off to join his uncle's acting troupe, and there really is no cause for concern. Until, of course, his body turns up. Novella length; the thirteenth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

When the solid gold statue of a female baker gifted to the oracle at Delphi by King Croesus of Lydia and missing for over three centuries unexpectedly reappears on the Athenian black market, Corvinus's stepfather Helvius Priscus recruits him as go-between in the purchase. Priscus, though, it turns out, isn't the only interested party, and where bidding methods are concerned his rivals don't play games... The fourth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

Bathyllus was standing with his back to me, and sitting on the bed was a seriously-unshaven late-middle-aged man in a grubby threadbare tunic. Bathyllus turned round, the guy got up, and they both stared at me, jaws dropping, like actors at the end of a play where the god is lowered from a crane to sort out a too-convoluted plot. 'Hi, sunshine, ' I said to Bathyllus. 'So who's your friend?' I'd never, ever seen Bathyllus lost for words before, but I saw it now. He swallowed a couple of times, coughed, and then said: 'This is Damon, sir. He's my brother.' When Corvinus's major-domo Bathyllus's long-lost brother turns up in a Suburan tenement he is totally gobsmacked. And things don't improve when he discovers that Brother Damon is a serial crook on the run whose owner and partner-in-crime has just died under very suspicious circumstances. Digging into the whys and wherefores brings its own dangers. Especially when the case turns political... The fact that his mother suspects her octogenarian husband Priscus of having an affair and wants him to look into the matter doesn't help much, either. The nineteenth book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

When Rome's blue-eyed boy Germanicus, adopted son and possible heir of the Emperor Tiberius, dies abroad in highly suspicious circumstances, the finger points squarely at the Dowager Empress Livia; and Corvinus, fresh and still smarting from his recent brush with the lady, has no reason to believe otherwise. Quite the reverse, in fact. Only when she summons him to the Palace for a private interview events take an unexpected and surprising turn... 'I swear, ' Livia said slowly, 'by all the gods above and below, by my hope of escaping torment in the next world for the murders I have committed in this and by my hope for my own eventual deification, that I was neither directly nor indirectly responsible for the death of my grandson Germanicus Caesar.' I was staring at her. She took her hand away from the altar. 'There. Close your mouth, now, you look ridiculous. Does that satisfy you, or would you like to dictate the words yourself?' 'No, that about covers it.' My head was spinning. 'You mind explaining why, now?' She lowered herself painfully back into her chair. It must've been built up because we were on the level again. 'Why the oath?' she said. 'Or why I brought you here in the first place?' 'Both, Excellency. They're the same thing anyway, aren't they?' 'Naturally. But if you've realised that then the answer to your question should be obvious.' 'Let's pretend it isn't. Tell me anyway.' 'Oh, Corvinus! You disappoint me!' Her thin lips turned down. 'Of course, now you know that I wasn't responsible for Germanicus's death I want you to find out who was.' The second book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

He is poisoning me. I saw it in his eyes before we sailed, despite the smile on his lips: 'It's only a fever, Virgil. And you deserve it for traipsing off to Greece without telling me. What made you think the poem needed three years' editing, you beetroot?' It is as artificial as it sounds, this bluff heartiness and rustic eccentricity of language. Like so many of his amiable qualities it serves a very practical purpose. Octavian is nothing if not a pragmatist. Literally nothing. Strip the layers from an onion. The bit that is left, that is Octavian. I, Virgil, the 'autobiography' of Rome's greatest poet, traces the fall of the Republic and the rise of the first emperor, Augustus Caesar. Warts and all.

'Uh...Dad?' Young Lucius's face was chalk white. 'Dad, I think he's dead.' It took a moment to register. Then Renatius dropped the towel and was through the door in five seconds flat, and the rest of the wineshop, including me, were about two seconds behind him. When Pegasus, racing mega-star and lead driver of the Whites faction, is found stabbed to death in the alleyway beside Renatius's wineshop, Marcus Corvinus is already on site. The local District Watch - crooked to a man - claim that the killer's motive was simple theft, but Corvinus knows it wasn't. Tracking the murderer down, with the often-unwilling help of his wife Perilla, takes him deep into the murky world of Roman chariot-racing with all its secrets, skulduggeries and scams; and his task is not made any easier by the fact that in the process he has a lovesick major-domo, an invisible dagger and Mount Etna to contend with. The seventh book in the Marcus Corvinus series.

Ancient Roman sleuth Marcus Corvinus uncovers a treasonous plot in this witty and intriguing new mystery November, AD 40. When a wealthy consul's wife asks Corvinus to investigate the death of her uncle, killed by a block of falling masonry during renovations on his estate in the Vatican Hills, a sceptical Corvinus is inclined to agree with the general verdict of accidental death. But his investigations reveal clear evidence of foul play, as well as unearthing several skeletons among the closets of this well-to-do but highly dysfunctional family. Who could have wanted Lucius Surdinus dead? His vengeful ex-wife? His ambitious mistress? His disillusioned elder, or his estranged younger, son? Or does the key to the mystery lie in the dead man's political past? But when Corvinus's investigations draw him to the attention of the emperor, a dangerously unpredictable Caligula, his prospects of surviving long enough to solve the mystery look slim to say the least.

'A piece of advice before we start. Don't believe those fools who preach that death is a friend, or worse, like Paullus and his crew of fanatics, the happy gateway to a better and fuller existence. It's nothing of the sort. Death, gentle reader, is nothing but a necessary bore, and you can tell it I said so. There, now. If I really have to die before my time (and needs must, ho hum, when the emperor drives, even when the emperor is poor loopy Lucius) then I intend to savour every minute of the process. Even if it kills me.' This is the Emperor Nero, seen through the not-wholly-unsympathetic eyes of his erstwhile friend and Arbiter of Taste, the author and aesthete Titus Petronius Niger, currently committing enforced (but comfortable and pleasantly prolonged) suicide at his villa in Cumae; the inside story, including the answer to the question of who did burn Rome, and why...

No good deed goes unpunished. Marcus Corvinus, the party-boy of ancient Rome, hasn?t committed many good deeds, but his most recent (see Ovid) was a doozy. And sure enough, here comes punishment. Why else would he have been summoned to see the Empress Livia, never his biggest fan. For now, however, Livia has a job for Corvinus: Her darling grandson, Germanicus, heir-presumptive to the throne, has been most foully murdered, and Livia will not rest until Corvinus finds the killer. Corvinus is glad to oblige, since he?d like to continue breathing. But word on the Appian Way is that Livia herself ordered her grandson's death.

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It is the morning after the nocturnal rite of the good Goddess, an all-female ceremony strictly out of bounds to the male of the species, and the body of a young woman has been found, her throat cut. Suicide or murder?Hoping to avoid scandal, Senator Lucius Arruntius calls in Marcus Corvinus to do some discreet sleuthing. Marcus is helped in his investigations by a feisty flutegirl and by his clever, loyal wife Perilla (even though her attention is somewhat distracted by the acquisition of a revolutionary new clock). But - inevitably - to solve the mystery, Marcus must look beyond the obvious and first untangle a complex web of treachery and deceit.

When Corvinus receives a letter, with a tantalising PS, from his adopted daughter, Marilla, mentioning there might have been a murder, he hot-foots it to Castrimoenium at once. Not that everyone agrees that Lucius Hostilius was murdered. Poison was apparently the means of death, but Lucius was terminally ill: it was only a matter of time. Although he hasn't any official investigative status, Corvinus can't resist doing a little amateur sleuthing. And he has barely begun when two other corpses turn up and he is formally on the case. Lucius had been suffering something of a personality change because of his illness, so there is no shortage of suspects among friends and family whom he had antagonised. But Corvinus goes up many a blind alley before arriving at the heart of the mystery. As we follow Marcus Corvinus, clue by clue, on his twelfth case, we allow ourselves to be pleasurably diverted by rumours of Meton's love life - and by an authentic recipe for fish pickle sauce . . .

AD 40. When a wealthy consul's wife asks Marcus Corvinus to look into the suspicious death of her uncle, killed by a block of falling masonry, his investigations will draw him to the attention of the emperor, a dangerously unpredictable Caligula. Will Corvinus survive long enough to solve the mystery?