About book Search The Seven Hills (The Quirinal Hill Affair) (1987)
When I first started reading SF/F, Barbara Hambly quickly became one of my favorite authors, and her Windrose Chronicles in particular I reread every year. So I was excited to find that she'd also written a mystery set in Ancient Rome. I love Rome! Awesome! But... it didn't really work for me.The book has a great premise and setup: Here in the time of Trajan, Marcus Silanus, a noble young philosopher-in-training, is not so secretly in love with Tullia, who is betrothed to a rich Syrian merchant. They are meeting and bemoaning the fact that, well, they can't marry each other, when tragedy strikes! A gang of ruffians jumps them and abducts Tullia! They leave a little silver fish behind. Horrors! It's the Christians! Everyone knows they're a bunch of hideous baby-killers! They would definitely sacrifice her! So Marcus has to search the city to find her before it is Too Late.Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, it's a good idea, but that's about all it is. With Hambly's usual style, the book goes for the sort of atmospheric setting description that is present in all her fantasy. But so many of the details are just a little bit wrong. And, okay, maybe it doesn't bother anyone else that "vomitoriums" are in there. Maybe it doesn't bother anyone else that pretty much every Roman name (including the main character and his love interest and the guy who is unfortunately named the Latin word for "couch") is done wrong. It's not quite Rome, and it kept throwing me.But I think I could have overlooked that (okay, maybe not the names) if only I had come to care about the characters and what happened to them. I didn't. The Christians spent a lot of the time squabbling and accusing each other of heresies, and mostly it came across as a lot like an unfunny Life of Brian that was trying too hard. The Romans had the requisite orgies and lions in the arena. A lot of lions. It was all just kind of... meh. Maybe it's that one of the things I like about Hambly's writing is the female characters and there were no women here? I don't know. It just wasn't especially good.
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