Ruso starts asking questions, and things start to happen-a burning brand through the window of his house, a trowel dropped from a rooftop and missing him only because Tilla saw it and pushed him out of the way-and his financial situation gets more and more complicated. He keeps hearing more than he wants to because, to get her out of the military hospital, he rents a room for the slave girl, who finally speaks enough to decide to go by the name Tilla, upstairs in the bar. While he's treating the girl and coaxing her to talk, he becomes not so much interested in as worried about the deaths of two bar girls, and the lack of any investigation into their deaths. He doesn't need to buy an injured slave girl to rescue her from her sadistic owner, especially when she's too injured to work, won't talk, and will cost more to feed than she's worth. Ruso has spent an unpleasant night examining the body of a dead woman fished out of the harbor, and then a long day on medical rounds. They have no servant to clean and cook for them, and their lodgings show it.

In the meantime, he's sharing a mouse-infested with another army doctor and the previous owner's former dog, who has produced a litter of puppies. He's struggling to pay off his father's debts, with his brother at home in Gaul working to keep the real state of their finances quiet so that their efforts have time to work. Now he's divorced, his father has died leaving behind a mountain of debt, his brief notoriety is forgotten, and Trajan is dead. Not very long ago, he was married, a hero (he had saved the Emperor Trajan's life), and the elder son of a prosperous family in southern Gaul. Gaius Petrius Ruso is doctor serving with a Roman legion in Britain. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own. The first novel in the New York Times bestselling Gaius Petreius Ruso series. If only the locals would just stop killing each other and if only it were possible to find a decent glass of wine, and someone who can cook, Ruso's prospects would be a whole lot sunnier. It's up to Ruso to summon all his skills to investigate, even though the breakthroughs in forensic science lie centuries in the future, and the murderer may be hunting him down too. not to mention a serial killer stalking the local streets.īarmaids' bodies are being washed up with the tide and no one else seems to care. He has vast debts, long shifts, and an overbearing hospital administrator to deal with. The Gods are not smiling on army doctor Gaius Petreius Ruso in his new posting in Britannia. A serial killer is on the loose in Roman-occupied Britain, and Gaius Petreius Ruso is out to catch him.

Medicus by Ruth Downie