Gary Corby, The Pericles Commission

I very much like the idea of these books, a detective series set in 5th-century B.C. Athens. Nicolaos, the son of Sophroniscus, is a young man with political ambitions who becomes a sort of detective after he's the first on the scene of a murder. The murdered man turns out to be Ephialtes, a democratic reformer who really was murdered back in the day. In the book, the victim's colleague Pericles (yes, THAT Pericles) commissions Nicolaos to find Ephialtes' killer. Other personalities from the ancient world walk across Corby's pages—the priestess Diotima, Lysimachus, and Callias, for example. We'll also likely be hearing a lot more in the series from Nicolaos' little brother, a short and squat, precocious kid with the face of a satyr: Socrates. Yes, that Socrates. (For those of you keeping track, Socrates and his dad are historical; Nicolaos is not.)

The book was well done, I thought. My only reservation is that I got a little confused when it came to the resolution of the mystery. Perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention. There was a lot of intrigue, and lots of names bandied about, and I wouldn't be able to tell you at the moment exactly who was responsible for Ephialtes' death. Still, I like Nicolaos as a protagonist, and I enjoyed the world Corby created.