Something very odd about the fountain

I'm reading another book I don't think much of: One for Sorrow, which is a murder mystery purportedly about "John the Eunuch," the chamberlain to the Byzantine emperor Justinian. (I have read a great many books I did like since the last thing I felt like complaining about, but somehow my plans to do mini reviews by month continue not to be gotten around to.) At any rate, I picked it up from the library because I wanted Byzantine culture reference, and most of their non-fiction options are straight history, often of other things in relation to Byzantium.

Unfortunately, I'm not entirely convinced that the authors know a lot more about Byzantine culture than I do. The prose is weirdly jerky, slipping both topics and points of view unpredictably, which gives one the impression that all the characters are spacey and not terribly bright, and most of them are distressingly stereotyped. There's a lot of description given to Mithraic rituals, and apparently half the characters we get to know (including several high court officials & John himself) are secret worshipers of Mithra-- and the randomly introduced knight who's turned up from King Arthur's court (yes, really!) keeps hinting to all and sundry that he is also a worshipper of Mithra, despite being on grail quest. Besides this, there appears to be only one brothel in the city, and everyone we've met from out-of-town is staying at the same inn. Ok, except for John's ex-lover and daughter, the former being the indirect cause of his castration, as he went off to buy her a birthday present and got captured by the Persians (of which he gave a rather graphic account, while drunk, to the Arthurian knight), and the latter who he has just discovered exists and is apparently encouraging a young friend from court to make up to.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm still reading the thing; the little details are just off (the word "eponymously" appeared twice in the first fifty pages) and as one of the things I've recently enjoyed reading was Megan Whalen Turner's very subtle series, I keep waiting for all the odd bits to come together and make it important that John talks to the mosaic on his walls and that there's something very odd about the fountain in the courtyard of the inn (which, despite everyone staying there, is in serious financial trouble according to its proprietors.) But John continues being weirdly spacy and doesn't seem to notice any of this. Also, Theodora is portrayed as a raging bitch, which bothers me after Gillian Bradshaw's impressive empress in The Bearkeeper's Daughter. In fact, I'm not yet done with this book because I took time out of being irritated with it to read The Beacon at Alexandria after checking the shelf to make sure that I had in fact got The Bearkeeper's Daughter to read afterwards.

So, ah... anyone know of any good Byzantine culture references, besides Gillian Bradshaw?