People who are devoted Dorothy Dunnett readers generally fall into two camps: the Lymond Lovers (her first series) and the Niccolo folk. I'm in the second camp. I like Lymond, but I love the House of Niccolo series.The thing is, I can't pick up any of the Niccolo books without wanting to read the...
Niccolo/Nicholas, a brilliant young man rapidly rising on the European business stage, is invited to establish a trading station at Trebizond, the last remnant of the Byzantine empire. His rival is Pagano Doria, deliberate mischief-maker, who has seduced and carried off Niccolo's very young stepd...
This is the story of Claes AKA Nicholas AKA Niccolo van der Poele and his meteoric, often painful rise from a dyer’s apprentice to one of the premier businessmen in sixteenth-century Europe. Nicholas is brilliant, hilarious, and possessed of the sort of intellect and drive that are simultaneously...
This is the fourth book in the House of Niccolo. Having left Cyprus, Nicholas embarks on an expedition to Africa, his two aims being trade and exploration. In the late 15th century, this journey is arduous and risky. Nicholas and his companions (on odd mix of people from his present and his past,...
I'm bumping my initial 4-star rating to 5, since this book is still making me think, and shake my head in wonder, several days after I finished reading it.Now that this series has well and truly sunk its claws into me, I'm chomping at the bit to start the third book, but I made a deal with myself...
This review will be long because D. Dunnett had drawn me to her outlandish stories until she had outdone it and stuffed her story with something I couldn't digest. I don't think I can force myself to finish the series, In fact I am not even sure if I can read her Lymond chronicles because maybe t...
Although I am thoroughly enjoying the Lymond Chronicles so far, this third book in the series struck me as having more difficulties in structure than the previous two (I am a first-time reader, so don't have the luxury of knowing how it all turns out in the end). The first scenes in Scotland, set...
"I want you to understand. I am going alone. The risk, if any, is mine. I have no dependants, no responsibilities; I am adamant that this time no one will accompany me. What I hope to do in Russia is worth the risk I shall take. Do you imagine I would do what I did tonight if I did not think it o...
How do you review a book for which the current rating system with its maximum five stars looks so insufficient? That’s the dilemma facing me. And as much as I think I can’t do justice to it, words might convey what the five stars can’t: explain why exactly I came to love this.The Chronicles of Ly...
Ugh. Hard to believe this is the same author who wrote very absorbing medieval historicals with such grace and intelligence. This is cheap James Bond and deadly tedious. There were 8 of these, of which this is the 7th. All are apparently now out of print and good riddance. Besides being ankle-dee...
This book was a vast improvement on its predecessor, and I'm not just saying that because it featured my hero Louis XI more prominently :). Unicorn Hunt was kind of a meandering travelogue that didn't really seem to accomplish much in terms of advancing the plot or the characterization...though I...
Operation Nassau starts promisingly, with a main character who is observant and very good in a crisis. A woman who has chosen to place her medical career above all else (though driven there to a degree by her eccentric father, who wants her to get married and give his clan heirs), she is perhaps ...
WHAT a family. Good God. Dorothy Dunnett is really quite the master of genetic complication. What is it that Philippa says in The Ringed Castle ... "I didn't know another permutation in breeding was possible."? Oh Philippa. With Dorothy Dunnett it is always possible.This is without question the b...
Having read all of Dorothy Dunnett's six-volume Lymond Chronicles, eight-volume House of Niccolo series and her standalone novel, King Hereafter, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I picked up one of her Johnson Johnson mystery novels. I wasn't entirely sure that I was starting with th...
Also know as Tropical Issue
Originally published on my blog here in March 1999.Dorothy Dunnett's novel of Scotland in the Dark Ages concerns the historical Macbeth - or does it? She certainly knows more about the situation in eleventh century Scotland than Shakespeare did (Macbeth ruled just before the Norman conquest of En...
Originally published on my blog here in February 1999.The seventh Niccolo book starts as his various businesses are trying to recover from the revelation of his activities in Scotland and their probably effect on the country's economy, he himself being exiled from Western Europe on pain of having...
Sarah Cassells, the narrator of Ibiza Surprise (originally published as Dolly and the Cookie Bird, as Sarah is a cook) is one of the most likeable heroines of a Johnson Johnson mystery to date. She's fun funny, just the right amount of frivolous, and a wonderful narrator. The story takes place in...
[7/10] extra star for being written by one of my favorite authorsBefore becoming a writer, Dorothy Dunnett was a voracious reader. According to her biography, when she complained to her husband that she has run out of reading material, he asked her why she doesn’t write her own stories. The resul...
These mysteries, what will all the wonderful characters, action, humor, and romance, would make wonderful movies. This one, maybe because its set in Italy, forcefully reminds me of The Tourist. In a good way. In this book the protagonist is astronomer Ruth Russell, doing a research stint in Rome....
We passed the Place du 16 novembre and the Place de la liberté and then suffered the full cultural shock of two wizened water-carriers in chenille tasselled hats who blocked the path of the taxi and tried to sell us some water. We had got to the Romantic Old Town. So had our quarry, who could be ...
Opening my eyes did nothing to correct it. The deafening wailing and rattling and thudding continued. It was pitch black, and I was rolling backwards and forwards among something that could have been heaps of soggy cushions. I felt dead sick. I felt dead. It was the problem of finding somewhere t...
There being nothing in the Margaret Beaseford College rules about wearing your uniform when caring for your employer’s kidnapped child or children, I had changed into pants and sneakers and sweater, with a thick quilted jacket on top. Mihovil, who was occupying Donovan’s bunk with a basin, was un...
1. Mishap to a Queening Pawn ON SUNDAY, the day after the affair at Lake of Menteith, Lord Culter was also taking aquatic exercise of a kind which all but turned his epithalamics into elegies. Mariotta, it is certain, was not alone in finding her husband baffling. Whatever his thoughts about bein...
Since I have no interest in the Casino and the golf-course has only recently been restored, I seldom trouble to cross it. At that hour in the morning the gamblers, the tennis players, the waterskiers and sunbathers were asleep; the helicopters and the yachts not yet in motion. Only a few other ca...
Five hours later we were in Messina, Sicily, Johnson having won the argument over whether to press on to Taormina by mentioning casually that both water tanks were empty and unless we called at Messina we shouldn’t have any ice for the gin. We tied up to a vast concrete waterfront filled with sig...
How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction? And lastly, how do you achieve all these things while (concealing yo...
The well-run, well-equipped kitchen of a household of means, smelling warmly of chicken.He turned his head further.A wooden tub. A scrubbed table with two truckle beds under it and a clutch of tallow candles on top. A wall covered with pans and pots of iron and copper and long-handled implements ...