(no subject)

Can anyone tell me when WisCon and A-Kon are this year?  I have no idea if I'll go to both/either (I wanted to last year, but they were a week apart, and that wasn't doable) but figure I should find out soonish.

Medicus by Ruth Downie

Gaius Petrius Ruso is a doctor recently transferred from Africa to the Roman garrison in Britannia in the town of Deva (now Chester) in the 2nd century. He’s dirt poor and recently divorced, his quarters are downright depressing, his roommate is a playboy who doesn’t hesitate to use him as a cover, and his superior is a petty tyrant. Not only that, but local girls are turning up dead, and since they aren’t Roman, he’s the only one who seems to care. He also spends most of the last of his money buying an injured slave girl from an abusive master.

Ruso is cranky and rather desperate when it comes to money, but nice and a bit of a pushover. The slave girl, Tilla, is snippy and opinionated and clever and has secrets. It’s debatable who’s in charge at the end.

This was sold to me as “Roman Nick & Nora” and has the potential to be so, though Tilla doesn’t get the opportunity to do a lot with the central plot this time, and it reminded me of the few Lindsay Davis books I read in college (I rarely found them and gave up, but should look into that again). There’s a lot of detail regarding the nitty-gritty of the times and Roman bureaucracy and medicine, and the attitudes regarding the slaves and natives/invaders are kept as true for the times as they can be without making the reader hate characters s/he is supposed to like, though there are times I cringed at things characters said and thought, and the situations of the female characters aren’t pretty, but handled tastefully.