The Ides of June / Rosemary Rowe

The Ides of June by Rosemary Rowe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For a book that was chosen frivolously for it's title, this was a pleasant surprise. My plan this year was to read a book each month that had the name of the month in the title. A silly thing, really, and then covid-19 screwed up my plans by closing the public library for 3 months. I'm only a month late reading this novel.

It's never ideal to start with the 16th book in a series, but I must say that Rowe made it easy to step right in and figure out who was who and what to expect. I keep trying these murder mysteries set in various ancient settings, hoping for something that I enjoy as much as Ellis Peters’ Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, but so far no joy. Peters seems to have been rather exceptional at grabbing my interest and attention.

However, this is a good, solid novel. I required a couple of chapters to get used to the author's form of “bygonese" and become comfortable with it, but I did make the adjustment. Libertus is a good main character, a man with a diverse background, a Celt in the Roman Empire in what we now call the United Kingdom. In this, he has some resemblance to Brother Cadfael, who had real world military experience before joining the abbey. The limitations of travel and communications in Roman Britain make some aspects of the mystery a bit clunky, but the author handles these drawbacks realistically.

I'm unsure if I like this enough to read further adventures of Libertus, but I certainly enjoyed it enough to rate it a 3 star read, straining towards the upper echelons of that rating. (Three stars tends to be a rather big, baggy category for me, asked to hold a lot of books that I like, but don't love).


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