July's recommendation: the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. Books I've read so far are The Game of Kings, Queen's Play, and The Disorderly Knights; remaining books are Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle, and Checkmate.
For a while now, I've been considering recommending The Game of Kings. Why only that one? Because I'd read Queen's Play, and while it wasn't bad, it didn't impress me nearly so much as the first book had. I started reading The Disorderly Knights, and it seemed better than the second but not so good as the first, and so I figured I wouldn't make a recommendation for the whole series.
Then the plot of The Disorderly Knights accomplished the feat of simultaneously imploding and exploding in a truly phenomenal way, and when my brain was done melting, I knew I had to recommend the whole series.
Yeah, there's no guarantee the later three books are as good. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, though. So, what is this series? It's historical fiction, set in the mid-sixteenth-century, concerning . . . well, I used to describe it as Scottish/English politics, but given the time period, that means dragging in the Irish and the French and the Spanish and the Turks and so on and so forth. I'll say European politics instead. It follows the activities of one Francis Crawford of Lymond, younger brother of the Baron of Culter, a southern Scottish holding.
Dunnett comes rather close to a trap common to writers who base a series around a particular character, namely, that Lymond is excessively cool. Sometimes it seems there is no language he does not speak, no task he cannot accomplish. I think there are two things, though, which knock down his pedestal a bit. The first is that Dunnett still finds ways to screw Lymond over. He may be a bad-ass, but he still gets into situations where all his cleverness and guts cannot save him from something really unpleasant happening (sometimes it even happens to him). The second mitigating factor is that his method of accomplishing whatever it is he's set out to do frequently involves him being a complete bastard, even to those few people who might be considered his friends and allies.
So Lymond's certainly not perfect. You learn that at the beginning of The Game of Kings, when he returns to Scotland after years of absence and promptly sets his family keep on fire and threatens his own mother at sword-point. Oh, and did I mention that part of the reason he left in the first place was that he had blown up a nunnery, complete with nuns and his own sister inside? The plot of The Game of Kings centers around his return, and the baffling question of why the hell Lymond would come back when his own brother would gladly and without hesitation stick his head on a pike. (No love lost between those two.) I shan't say much about the plot of the later books, though, as it would imply certain things about the plot of the first.
Instead I shall talk about other things, like the level of historical detail Dunnett includes. One might describe it as "insane." Thanks to her, I now know that there was a tournament event back then which involved tying a parrot to the top of a 120-ft. pole and shooting arrows at it. (wtf?) If you want to read these books, I highly suggest cultivating the ability to go with the flow and not worry about the flood of information coming at you. If a name or institution or event is important, you'll pick up what you need to know by osmosis; don't slam to a halt on every new detail out of some misguided belief that you need to remember them all. Same thing goes for language. You have a choice of reading these books with, let's see, dictionaries in French, Spanish, German, Irish Gaelic, Scots English, Latin, Greek, and Arabic -- just to name the languages that I happen to remember coming across so far -- or else trusting that the important bits will all be in English. Dunnett is not interested in stopping her story to translate or explain. But if you can accept that, and just sink into the wealth of detail, these books are fascinating.
I also happen to like the characters a lot. I'd have to go back and check to be sure, since this only occurred to me near the end of The Disorderly Knights, but I think we rarely get scenes from Lymond's point of view; we're more often seeing him through the eyes of others. This has several effects. As far as Lymond is concerned, it both makes him enigmatic (just what the hell is he up to?) and allows Dunnett to give us a better sense of how cool he is. It also means that secondary characters can become more fleshed out; Lymond is at the center, but not overwhelmingly so.
The quality of characterization extends to the women as well. This is one place I think Dunnett does a great job; she manages to give her female characters important and interesting roles without being anachronistic about it. Sybilla in particular -- mother of Lymond and the current Lord Culter -- is a phenomenal woman, and it's fascinating to see her interactions with her younger son. She, like the other Scottish ladies who play a role in the stories, may spend most of her time at home, taking care of the household, but that doesn't mean she has no influence over events.
And to round all of this off, we have the plots of the books, which are well-constructed -- sometimes diabolically so -- with a great deal of dry, sardonic humour, and the occasional appearance of some brilliant strategic gambit on the part of Lymond, who is a master of pulling off great effects with rather limited resources. To pull in a Sandbaggers reference for a moment, I'd say that if you had Burnside running your intelligence service and Lymond running, not your army, but your special forces, you just might be able to take over the world.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to continue my hunt for the fourth book, which has vanished from the library. The Disorderly Knights ended on something of a massively unresolved note, and if I don't find out what happens next I may explode.