Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [0]
Dorothy Dunnett’s
LYMOND CHRONICLES
“Dorothy Dunnett is one of the greatest talespinners since Dumas … breathlessly exciting.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Dunnett is a name to conjure with. Her work exemplifies the best the genre can offer. It combines the accuracy of exhaustive historical research with a gripping story to give the reader a visceral as well as cerebral understanding of an epoch.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Dorothy Dunnett is a storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about suspense, pace and invention.”
—The New York Times
“Dunnett evokes the sixteenth century with an amazing richness of allusion and scholarship, while keeping a firm control on an intricately twisting narrative. She has another more unusual quality … an ability to check, her imagination with irony, to mix high romance with wit.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“First-rate … suspenseful.… Her hero, in his rococo fashion, is as polished and perceptive as Lord Peter Wimsey and as resourceful as James Bond.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A masterpiece of historical fiction, a pyrotechnic blend of passionate scholarship and high-speed storytelling soaked with the scents and colors and sounds and combustible emotions of sixteenth-century feudal Scotland.”
—Washington Post Book World
“With shrewd psychological insight and a rare gift of narrative and descriptive power, Dorothy Dunnett reveals the color, wit, lushness … and turbulent intensity of one of Europe’s greatest eras.”
—Raleigh News and Observer
“Detailed research, baroque imagination, staggering dramatic twists, multilingual literary allusion and scenes that can be very funny.”
—The Times (London)
“Ingenious and exceptional … its effect brilliant, its pace swift and colorful and its multi-linear plot spirited and absorbing.”
—Boston Herald
“A lively, busy narrative that features an energetic hero in whom we find Ivanhoe’s temperate nationalism, D’Artagnan’s fine swordsmanship, and James Bond’s unchivalrous way with women.”
—The New Yorker
Dorothy Dunnett
The
DISORDERLY
KNIGHTS
Dorothy Dunnett was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. She is the author of the Francis Crawford of Lymond novels; the House of Niccolò novels; seven mysteries; King Hereafter, an epic novel about Macbeth; and the text of The Scottish Highlands, a book of photographs by David Paterson, on which she collaborated with her husband, Sir Alastair Dunnett. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth appointed her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. She died in 2001.
BOOKS BY
Dorothy Dunnett
THE LYMOND CHRONICLES
The Game of Kings
Queens’ Play
The Disorderly Knights
Pawn in Frankincense
The Ringed Castle
Checkmate
King Hereafter
Dolly and the Singing Bird (Rum Affair)
Dolly and the Cookie Bird (Ibiza Surprise)
Dolly and the Doctor Bird (Operation Nassau)
Dolly and the Starry Bird (Roman Nights)
Dolly and the Nanny Bird (Split Code)
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise (Tropical Issue)
Moroccan Traffic
THE HOUSE OF NICCOLÒ
Niccolò Rising
The Spring of the Ram
Race of Scorpions
Scales of Gold
The Unicorn Hunt
To Lie with Lions
The Scottish Highlands
(in collaboration with Alastair Dunnett)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1997
Copyright © 1966 by Dorothy Dunnett
Copyright renewed 1994 by Dorothy Dunnett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage
Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally
published in Great Britain in hardcover by Cassell & Company Ltd.,
London, and in the United States in hardcover by
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1966.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunnett, Dorothy.
The disorderly knights / Dorothy Dunnett.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76230-6
I. Title.
PR6054.U56D57 1997
823′.914—dc21 96-45599
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1_r1
In affectionate memory
of my grandparents Annie and Martin Halliday
and of my father, Alexander Halliday,
who was born in Valetta, Malta