I finished A Flame in Byzantium last night. It wasn’t so bad.
Like Yarbro’s other books, this is a competently written and very accurate piece of historical fiction, with a vampire thrown in inexplicably as the main character. In this case, it’s set in the Byzantine Empire, and follows Octavia Clemens as she’s forced to leave Rome and travel to Constantinople due to enemy attacks on the city. What follows is a whole bunch of double-dealing, subtle poisoning, dishonesty and betrayal. As before, the author plays up the misogyny of the Byzantine culture by having Clemens react to it as a strong woman from another culture — she isn’t allowed to own property, enter into agreements or even read official documents without the help of her (male) sponsor. She gets in trouble when that sponsor, a highly-ranked General, is targeted by elements within the administration to be dishonored and ruined.
The kinds of things they do are pretty unbelievable: slowly poisoning his wife, causing him months of grief and exhaustion as he tries to care for her in her failing condition; finding innocuous books in the General’s library and then adding them to the list of banned books (such as a book on the care of injured horses, added only because it’s written in Latin and therefore blasphemous); and “expunging” his most trusted lieutenants, banishing them and their families from the Empire and making it illegal to even mention their names. Octavia is dragged into the issues but is able, through her centuries-old wisdom, to defend herself from the attacks (at least for a while). In the end, most of protagonists end up alive but in bad shape, while most of the antagonists get their comeuppance off-screen (as it were).
Like I said, the book was OK but it really was kind of dull and I spent the whole time reading it being annoyed at the fact that the main character was a friggin’ vampire for reasons purely of plot convenience. Anyways, now I’m reading Steven Gould’s Blind Waves, a cool science fiction book about the future where ocean levels have risen 100 feet.