Susan Price's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2023
• 2025

I've loved history since the day my primary school headmaster walked into our class and told us he'd be taking our history lessons, starting with the Stone Age. What? There was a time when people didn't have shops and had to make their tools out of stone? -- It was that which captivated me: the differences between then and now. I couldn't have cared less about the date or what king was pretending to be God's gift. I wanted to know how people cooked, how they made their clothes, how they celebrated their birthdays.
So I love books which immerse you in the past, ignoring the present -- and the Falco books come close to that. Falco narrates his own tales, and he's a witty, charming, engaging character. The past he invites us to join him in is that of Ancient Rome, which comes noisily and stinkingly to life around him. Falco was born in Rome's slums, and served in the legions-- and in this book, the first in the series, he travels to the gods-forsaken end of the Empire, the wet, cold islands of Britain.
Falco is something like a Roman private detective, or secret agent, and he fights his way through many dangerous, desperate situations, using his wits as much as his fists and dagger. But the great charm of the books lies in the great family of characters around him, who he loves and squabbles with, and who squabble with him, while loving him. And all the detail of meals, slum tenements, fish-sauce, foul alleys, frayed tunics, wax tablets... Detail not only well-researched but vividly imagined.

When you've read-- and loved-- all the Falco books, what to read next? Well, luckily, Lindsey Davis has provided the Flavia Albia books. 'The Ides of April' is the first.
In one of the Falco books, Falco and his wife adopt a young girl they find living rough on the streets of Londinium, in Britain. Albia is that girl, and she takes over Falco's work of investigation on Rome's mean streets.
It's fascinating the way the differences between the two series are handled. Falco has the strength and weapon-training to get physical if he has to-- but Albia is a young woman, described as small and slight. Due to her starved childhood, she is not robust. She is courageous and determined, but her approach to her work has, of necessity, to be different.
And then there's the attitude of other people. Falco is often despised for his slum, plebeian background-- but Albia is despised simply for being a woman, even though she has the social manners of the upper classes, learned from her adoptive mother. Through Albia's eyes, we get a different view of Rome.
Albia, narrating her own stories, is both witty and observant, though she doesn't quite have
Falco's engaging charm, nor his one-liner wit-- but then, she wouldn't be an independent character if she did! She has her own quieter, sly, satiric comments on the life around her -- which is as vividly imagined and detailed as in the Falco books. Her satire is often turned on the men in her life, including Falco. She calls him 'father' and loves him, but is quite clear-sighted about him-- which sends you back to the Falco books! No bad outcome, in my view.

This is a 'police procedural' about Constable Peter Grant of the Metropolitan Police -- which all sounds quite sane and straightforward, doesn't it?
Except Peter takes a statement from a ghost-- and then finds himself recruited to the 'Isaacs', so called after Isaac Newton, who was both scientist and alchemist; who pushed forward our understanding of science while himself believing in magic. The Isaacs are the branch of the Met which deals with ghosts, werewolves, zombies, wizards, witches and unicorns. And the rest.
Peter is taken under the wing of the Isaac's chief officer, Thomas Nightingale, who fought in a wizard regiment in WWII. He undertakes to teach Peter magic and introduces him to the gods and goddesses of London's rivers.
Peter is the narrator and has a dry wit. The books are furiously inventive and funny. I love the notion of naiads and dryads, vampires, ghouls, trolls and all the many creatures of myth and folklore, co-existing with London traffic and crime, with the underground, Bazalgette's sewers, pubs and street-markets. They take it all in their stride. (Or glide?)
I also love the recognition that Britain is a multi-culture. Peter's father is an English jazz musician; his mother is from Sierre-Leone, and a lot of humour comes from her attempts to impose her strict culture on her British son. All the river goddesses seem to be black. The Isaac's forensic officer is a Glaswegian Scot named Walid.
I've loved Classical Greek and Roman Myth since I was nine-- and I absolutely love this merging of it with the 21st Century!