'He was a bastard, but she loved him.' That was the first parody of romance fiction I ever encountered, and I'm not sure I understood it until I read the Lymond Chronicles, and I certainly wouldn't have bothered if I hadn't read Niccolo first. Because Lymond is a supreme bastard, a villain, a traitor, a rogue, with a tongue like a flaying knife and utterly unremitting and remorseless. Or is he? Well, yes, but in service to a greater strategy which Dunnett unfolds, move by move, in this, her extraordinary first novel, a brilliant, occasionally clumsy, (but clumsy in way that would make experienced novelists green with envy) rigorously intelligent examination of a brilliant soul under severe duress and inflicting pressures and complications on people who he desires to protect, in his almost ridiculously backhanded way, or who come under, or place themselves under, his influence. Dunnett's skills and subtelties only get more impressive as she develops as a writer, but everything that follows is influenced by the introduction of the magnificent batsard who, despite everything, we come to love.