Thoughts on the Overall Book: I'm really glad I gave this book a go, because now I have found another historical series that I really love! "Medicus" is a somewhat quirky, easy to read historical fiction novel, and just the kind of book I love to sit down with before bed. I never thought I would enjoy a 'hospital drama' so much, but I really wouldn't put it in that category at all anyway. Number one, Ruso is an army surgeon who I always have much more respect for and can usually like, and two, it's light hearted, and not based around the hospital, so plus, plus.

Cover--Yea or Nay: I like the cover. It's obviously set in the Roman era, and it's simple, yet it looks like a mystery novel.

Characters: Okay, so I loved Ruso right off the bat. I adore dry witted characters, and even though this book wasn't in first person, it feels like it is because you're pretty much in Ruso's head. He's so good hearted, yet all this stuff happens to him because of it which totally makes for a sympathetic hero. I loved the quips between him and Valens. Ruth Downie writes men's relationships very well and can also tell truths about them only women would ever write about--such as the anti-cleanliness on their living quarters. Reading about how filthy their bachelor's quarters were and how they didn't care just made me crack up because I know all too well how true that is. I also really loved Tilla. She's just the kind of female protagonist I love to read about. She was capable of doing what she needed to, and yet she was never once annoying, though I wanted to shake her a couple times for listening to people she should have known better not to trust. But that all just made me sympathize with her in the end. Priscus was throughly fun to hate too. And though he wasn't a really evil baddie, the reader still wished to see Ruso get the better of him.

The Romance: There's not much at all, but it's definitely hinted (and expected) that Ruso and Tilla will have some sort of relationship in later books. And I support their romance because I genuinely care for them.

Writing Style: While not the most engaging mystery plot I have ever read, the characters were who really drove this story and made it enjoyable. You cared a lot for the characters. If I hadn't, I probably would have been more disappointed that there wasn't a better mystery plot line, but I really didn't feel cheated at all at the end of the book because of it. Ruth Downie's writing style is what really sold the book though, and made it work. It's filled with lovely wry humor that I adored, and is snappy, and engaging without being overly descriptive as some historical novels can be at times. I also appreciated that she addressed all the inaccuracies in the book in her author's note. As an author, and one who has dabbled in this time period and setting, I understand completely how hard it is to find real information for thorough research. The reader will notice the somewhat modern flair in the novel, but it is only going to make it a funner read unless you're a really stuffy person who shouldn't be reading anything but text books.

Problems/What bothered me: I really didn't have any complaints which made me really happy. Even though parts of this book take place in a brothel, nothing is described in detail. And for the people who don't like blood, there's not much of that either, considering this is a novel about army surgeons. I was really glad that the birthing scene was not detailed but even as it was, there was still too much detail for my liking. That is one of the few things that can make me want to throw up while reading.

Conclusion:4 stars, I really liked it, and am looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Recommended Audience: People who like an easy historical read would enjoy this. Also fans of the Falco novels would appreciate Ruso.

A nice cosy mystery, set in Roman Britain. Generally not my thing, but narrated by the peerless Simon Vance which always merits an additional star.

From the first pages of Medicus I was intrigued with the protagonist, Gaius Petreius Ruso, an Ancient Roman military doctor, and by his world. A Roman military doctor's job feels timeless in the hands of the author: soldiers' injuries from training, fights, and dangerous recreation; the local services surrounding the camp; under-staffing and less than perfectly-trained hospital personnel.

The element that stands out from the start of the book, however, is the element that should stand out in all novels set in the Ancient Roman Empire: slavery. The author of Medicus does not shy away from slavery; she actually makes it central to the story.

Medicus's subtitle is A Novel of the Roman Empire. It is not billed as a An Ancient Roman Mystery Novel because it is not one. Medicus is similar to Rosemary Sutcliff's classic Eagle of the Ninth in the way the dramatic story is supported by an underlying mystery. The principle story of both books is how the diverse cultures, Roman and Celtic, co-existed and eventually married in Britain.

I think Medicus is a well-written character-study of two people, and a historical romance novel rich with humanity. Like all good romances, the two people, Ruso and Tilla, begin by seeming worlds apart, and by the end of the book they seem a perfect fit. They make a good couple, better together than they are apart, and they share the same values.

For me, Medicus was a book to savor, to read slowly, to enjoy for the romance, the characters, the history, and for the portrayal of the constants of humanity through place and time.

From reading some readers' reviews, I suspect that a marketer once thought it would be a good idea to promote Ruth Downie's Ruso Series with the line "If you like Lindsey Davis's Falco, you'll love Ruso!" Whomever did this, did Ruth Downie and book-buyers a disservice. The two series are like chalk and cheese, as the British say; they are not comparable.

Davis's Falco Series is a first-person narrated, joke-filled, spoof of 1940s hard-boiled detective fiction, set in Ancient Rome. It is dotted with Roman history lessons that read as if they came straight from Wikipedia, presented like "Roman History For Dummies" from Falco's mouth to the reader.

Downie's Ruso Series is a third-person-limited narrated, serious-themed work dotted with dry humor, written in the style of a Traditional British Mystery (think Dorothy L. Sayers), set in Ancient Rome. The history of the period is embedded in the story, with the author wearing her vast knowledge lightly.

Because the author does not present the history pontifically, I have actually seen reviewers scoff at the a "dubious" history of very Roman things in Medicus, such as divorce, brothels, hospitals, medical capability, public administration, taxes, loans and debts, a postal service, and the use of inches and miles.

Briticisms also seem to be a problem for some readers, such as the word "corn", which is a generic term for "grain", and not the American "corn" which comes on a cob, which is actually, officially, called "maize".

That the ancient world was like ours, appears to stun some readers, if you read the low-rated reviews. They seem to expect the past to be foreign to us, but the author skillfully shows us that wherever people live under a similar system of a unifying bureaucracy paid for by taxes, with a similar capitalistic economic system funded on credit, society will shape itself into a lifestyle that we, in the "West", will find recognizable.

Human nature is the only constant through time, which seems to be another surprise for some readers of the Ruso Series. Again, the author skillfully shows us the truth of this, and that today's professional soldiers have much in common with their predecessors. And the town that exists around the Roman Military Fort would be recognizable to anyone who has seen the towns that surround U.S. Military Bases around the world.

I mention these reviewer-confusions because they strike me as unfair criticisms of this fine book.

Read my full and illustrated review at Italophile Book Reviews
http://italophilebookreviews.blogspot...

Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Went in expecting to be immersed in the life and culture of Roman-occupied Britain, and on that it failed to deliver. If you're a fan of historical fiction and are curious about life in an outpost of classical Rome, read "Pompeii" by Robert Harris.

Rounded up from 3.5*. Doesn’t feel much like a true Roman era historical fiction. For a bit in the beginning I thought I was listening to the wrong book, as it felt quite modern. Anyway, liked the story but probably not enough to continue this series.

I have been spoiled by the Marcus Didius Falco books by Lindsey Davis. This book tries hard but did not hold my interest enough for me to want to read more in the series.

Medicus, by Ruth Downie

This book is the beginning of a mystery series about a Roman doctor (medicus, in Latin) who joins the army to pay off family debts and lives in austere poverty while sending as much money home as possible to allow his siblings to keep the family farm and overcome the tangled debts of their father. It's a compelling setup, as it shows Gaius Petreius Ruso as a divorced man on the loose trying to find ways to earn enough money while dealing with the situation in Deva (modern Chester), which is only at its beginnings as a town developing on the outside of a Roman fort. The situation portrayed in the novel is pretty compelling, with the British torn between wanting to profit off of connection to the Romans and still trying to overthrow them, and the mutual incomprehension between the Roman and native worlds being compounded by the province's rather backwards air, lacking in civilization even as it does not lack in pretensions. If this is an unflattering portrayal of Britain, it is certainly one that is well-informed by its status as a backwards colonial area in a period where the Mediterranean world as well as Persia, India, Central Asia, and China were the apex of civilization at the time. The shady business going on all around the overworked doctor provides a suitable context for an accidental detective whose basic human decency leads him to investigate, however haltingly, a case of seemingly connected acts of violence, up to murder, in the local prostitute population of the town.

The plot of the novel itself is pretty enjoyable. The novel begins with the dead body of a mysterious woman who is found naked and with her red hair cut off, and from there we see Ruso go about his daily rounds as he appears to be the only person interested in the woman's life and story. If he is initially reluctant to investigate the murder, he is prompted to think that no one deserves to die this way, and his interest in the lives of the ordinary Britons, including purchasing a slave who is beaten and has her arm broken, makes him the subject of considerable local gossip and interest. While he is slowly becoming a detective of sorts, he simultaneously seeks a vacant medical promotion which would earn him some much appreciated extra income and is also trying to write a book to earn some money that way. As one might imagine, this doctor finds himself overworked, with not enough sleep, not quite enough money to get by, and problems in all aspects of his life, including a nosy and bossy medical administrator at the hospital who is more than a little bit of a control freak trying to keep supplies and expenses under his own personal control. If the mystery isn't too surprising to the reader, the interest that the writer has in showing family ties and the importance of identity and also of integrity and humanity is a welcome one.

Overall, this novel excels because of a few related gifts that the author--who apparently started her career as a novelist with this book--possesses to a high degree. For one, she has mastered the importance of characterization, which begins with little humorous touches in the list of characters at the very beginning of the novel, in the way that her hero is not portrayed as being superhuman in insight but simply willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, doggedly seeking to provide the dead and the living with the truth about what is going on, which leads to a dramatic and bloody ending that substantially shrinks the pool of characters who will serve as minor characters in the next novel of the series. The author's commitment to giving her main character trouble, but also giving him the resources to get out of that trouble, at least to make it to the next problem, is a welcome one, and her skill in making this frontier world at the edge of civilization detailed and rich with gentle humor is a welcome one. This is a world you are going to want to spend time in if you appreciate murder mysteries with hints of political intrigue set in the world of Roman Britain at the beginning of the second century AD.

I was hoping for a fun murder mystery set in Roman occupied Britannia, full of cool insights into a Briton culture clashing with a roman culture, or at least a fun plot, but this book was really small in scope, kind of boring, and had some super weird (bad weird, not good weird) plot points involving the slavery of the British.

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I wanted to. I don't know why I was expecting a more sophisticated "who-done-it" but I was. Anyway things I liked about the story, I liked the fact there was always something happening. It didn't drone on and on about minute details that had no value to the story. I rather liked the ending. It's one of those feel goods that supports the whole, "If you love something set it free..." mindsets.

What I didn't like... Even as busy as it was I was sometimes bored. In fact I considered a few times just skipping to the end to see how things turned out and moving on. I am a firm believer that life is to short to be wasted on books you aren't enjoying when there are so very many good ones out there. In the end, I was glad I didn't. The last 75 pages were worth hanging in there.

Would I recommend this book? I don't know, this would be good keep your mind busy on a plane or waiting for a doctors appointment material. It's not something I would recommend to anyone who is researching a realistic glimpse of the Roman Empire, or doings. It certainly isn't a fair or accurate portrayal of the Britannic people of the time, as the author notes there are few if any records written by the people of that time and place who were not of the Roman Empire. It would be impossible to guess how they really thought, felt, or survived.

So that's what I can tell you about this book without offering up spoilers. Enjoy.

It's an entertaining read. Set in Roman Britain, in Chester. A newly arrived Roman Army doctor, Russo,is trying to advance his career and pay off his debts when he is involved in ascertaining the cause of death of a female body. He becomes entangled in investigating the deaths and disappearances of a series of sex workers from the local brothel. His questions make him very unpopular, and he also manages to buy himself an injured British girl who has been badly abused by the trader who abducted her.
He soon finds Tilla, the girl, gives him more problems, gets him into more trouble with the authorities, and yet more debt.

This excellent historical mystery is simultaneously tense and funny, as we meet the dour Roman medicus Ruso, a man with a lot of debt and memories of a bad marriage and plenty of motivation to write his book, a concise first aid manual, and make lots of money. Unfortunately for Ruso, he is a man of compassion and decency in a corrupt world, and I suspect he will be a while making his fortune in Roman Britain.

I will certainly want to check in on his progress through future installments of this series.

My sister has put me onto this series, and I will be reading them all. I have no idea if the actual mysteries are good --- the one at the heart of the first book isn't --- but the setting is genius and the characters are well-drawn. It would make a wonderful series for PBS Mystery, and that is high praise from me. Downie has created the world of early second century Britain. The central characters are Romans stationed at the outpost of Deva, chiefly a doctor named Ruso and his slave, Tilla. It has been a long dry spell since I have read an historical novel that made me feel as though I were actually in a different time and place, but Downie pulls it off so well that I didn't even care that the "mystery" didn't make a whole lot of sense. I wanted to know what happened to Ruso, Tilla, Chloe, Valens --- honestly, this was a good read.