Review of Dead in the Water, by David Wishart, pub. 2025

[sheenaghpugh]

“Marcus. If Meton is stuck in bed upstairs for the foreseeable future, then who’s doing the cooking?”

Who indeed? Meton the anarchic but brilliant chef is so essential to the Corvinus household that his indisposition is a serious matter, especially since the solution proposed by Vipsania, Corvinus’s mother, is to play her own chef, the too-inventive Phormio, as substitute… Meanwhile Corvinus is investigating another murder, that of an inoffensive boatman with no known enemies. His investigations take him to Corsica, where he runs into an old acquaintance of his and ours, the philosopher Seneca, currently in exile. Corvinus has fond memories of their former meeting:

“He may be a serial furkler, a social climber of the first water and a third-rate poet, but he hasn’t got a speck of real political ambition in his makeup, let alone the stomach for any kind of risk-taking. He’s a worm, the sort that gives other invertebrates a bad name.”

It's the presence of Seneca that alerts us to the fact that this is one of the “political” Corvinus cases. As so often with these cases, the ending proves frustrating for Corvinus, in that though he knows whodunnit, there is a limit to what he can do about it.

Indeed in some ways this feels like one of those films-in-the-middle-of-a-trilogy, where you can sense that the author is building up to No 3. The first in this “trilogy” would have been Family Commitments, two or three books ago, in which Corvinus became aware of certain treasonable goings-on involving a relative.  Three characters from that book, his major-domo Bathyllus. the latter’s slightly dodgy brother Damon, and the freedman at the top of the civil service, Narcissus, also figure in this case.  And I can guess what the climax of the third is set to be…

In the meantime we have a complex plot with one quite surprising (but plausible) twist at the end, and some memorable characters.

You can keep up with Mr Wishart’s proceedings on his website.