I have joined some yahoo groups comprised of similarly obsessed people and have just added this to my review of Pawn in Frankincense over on Goodreads. Someone at the yahoo Marzipan group lifted it from another blog and did not give a source, but I'm posting it because it says so much better than I what these books have meant to me:
“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. 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.
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