The House of Niccolo 07 - Caprice and Rondo

This latest installment in Dunnett's House of Niccolo series finds her hero, Nicholas de Fleury, in exile in Poland, having given up his shares in his far-flung banking enterprise in the preceding book, To Lie with Lions (1996), and alienated his friends and family in pursuit of a private vendetta. As his next step, he embarks on a journey to Caffa, the Genoese colony in the Crimea, in the company of Anna, the beautiful and mysterious wife of the notary Julius. The three years the novel covers take him to Persia and Russia. In Persia, he accompanies the papal envoy to Tabriz to persuade the ruler to take arms against the Turks. In Moscow, where he is forced to flee after the Turks take Caffa, he becomes a favorite of a grand duchess and assists with the designs for a great cathedral. His journeys are ostensibly missions of trade and diplomacy, but the real reasons behind his travels are more complicated, involving mysteries from his past that are only gradually and partly revealed. Meanwhile, his estranged wife works with Nicholas' former partners in Bruges to rebuild the bank. Some threads of the ongoing saga are tied up, but plenty of loose ends remain for the next installment. As always, Dunnett's plot twists and her command of the period are mesmerizing, though it definitely helps to have read the previous books to sort through all the people and events. Despite her dense prose style, Dunnett is a writer who should appeal even to those who find most historical fiction superficial and unconvincing.