Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls
by R.S. Downie
Michael Joseph £12.99; 480pp
The Ruins
by Scott Smith
Bantam, £12.99; 336pp
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WITH RERUNS OF I, Claudius and Up Pompeii! trailing the return of the television blockbuster Rome and Robert Harris’s new West Wing-at-the-Forum trilogy, whatever the Romans did for us once, they’re doing it again.
Enter Ruth Downie, a mother of two from Milton Keynes with a much-hyped attempt to do a praetorian Patricia Cornwell. Her hero Ruso is a debt-laden medical officer transferred from Africa to the gloomy northern outpost of Deva — Chester to you and me — and drawn into investigating the murder of local prostitutes.
We are clearly meant to sympathise with his civilised sensibilities, while feeling for the native British and recognising the hospital administrator as a familiar NHS nightmare.
But Downie commits the cardinal sin for a classical tale-teller of revealing that she doesn’t really know Latin. Ruso’s British slave and love interest calls herself “Tilla” because she hears him say that she might be utila, useful. Sorry, there’s no such word: useful in Latin is utilis, for male and female. I hate to nitpick but it’s a bit of a howler and, sadly, makes me doubt some of the rest of the research. That said, this is a good yarn, with all the ingredients of serial soap opera. Ruso will be a hit, particularly with women readers, even if he wears socks with his sandals.
The Ruins evoked in Scott Smith’s first novel since his brilliant debut A Simple Plan have nothing to do with Romans. They are apparently Mayan, the remains of mine workings in the Mexican jungle. A group of American gap year-type kids set out with a Greek chum to find them when the brother of another holiday pal goes off with an archaeologist girl and fails to return.
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The ruins turn out to be the preserve of local Indians who try to frighten curious travellers away, but, if they cross an invisible boundary, forbid them to leave. The reason why becomes clear as they discover the flesh-stripped, overgrown bodies of the missing brother and many others.
The Greek is injured in a mine shaft and slowly it dawns on the group that the danger lies is the thick vegetation itself: a carnivorous, possibly sentient, plant.
In a classic Ten Little Indians scenario, the group falls one by one to the horror literally growing around them. A tense, emotional rollercoaster ride to the last page, which is all the more harrowing because we see it coming.