“It’s a good thing she’s dead.”

It was my friend Nora on the phone. Not hello, Penelope, this is Nora, how are you? Just “It’s a good thing she’s dead, or I’d kill her.”

I’d bugged Nora to read the Lymond Chronicles, raving that it was the most intense reading experience of my life. Now Nora had just finished book four, Pawn in Frankincense. She was crying, she was raging, and she wanted nothing better than to throttle Dorothy Dunnett. I knew how she felt.

I made the mistake of picking up the Lymond Chronicles while in library school. I was immediately, hopelessly hooked. For weeks, late at night when I was supposed to be studying information-seeking behavior, I was instead lost in the adventures of the dazzling Scottish mercenary, Francis Crawford of Lymond. Over the course of the six-volume saga, Lymond is entangled in plots, seductions and duels at most of the royal courts of mid-16th-century Europe, from France to Constantinople to Russia. Every chapter brings another surprise, another narrow escape, another wonderfully rich scene of Renaissance life.

Lymond is my favorite sort of hero: the tormented mastermind. He is a poet, musician, mathematical genius, and the greatest military mind of his day. He is witty in at least a dozen languages. He is also so racked by self-loathing that he repeatedly tries to goad otherwise nice people into killing him. He commits appalling acts for reasons that may become clear only hundreds of pages later into the story. Which brings me back to Nora’s phone call. Dunnett inflicts some cruel sucker punches on her readers. This is embarrassing to admit, but at one point, I screamed “Traitor!,” threw the book across the room, and began wailing in grief. My bewildered husband tried to comfort me, saying “But it’s only a story.” Only a story? For the past six weeks, it had been my life.