Caprice and Rondo
By Dorothy Dunnett
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50
ISBN 0679454772

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Dorothy Dunnett does not rest on her laurels. With Caprice and Rondo, volume seven in her House of Niccolo series, she adds still more mystery and suspense to the labyrinthine plots within plots that have marked the career of her 15th-century merchant/adventurer protagonist, Nicholas de Fleury. But first-time readers of Dunnett be forewarned: Although the Niccolo series is ably introduced and partially explicated by Judith Wilt, Caprice and Rondo will be heavy going for someone who has not read the earlier novels in the series.

At the end of volume six, To Lie with Lions, Dunnett's "master dissembler" -- now in Scotland -- has finally brought to fruition his most complex project: to wreck financially the country whose gentry terrified and rejected Nicholas's mother and Nicholas himself (see volume one, Niccolo Rising). It is a vengeance that has turned even his closest companions against him, a dire success that seems to ruin him as well as his adversaries.

And, as we learn in this next Niccolo volume, it is not just Nicholas at risk. Everyone around him -- from longtime friends and associates like Julius of Bologna to Nicholas's estranged wife Gelis and their son Jodi -- faces potential disaster.

Now, as Dunnett's readers have come to expect, the real mysteries and revelations begin, acted out on a playing field that stretches from Scotland to Poland, to Muscovy and beyond.

One of the charms of Dunnett's historical novels is the way Dunnett intermingles her own players with characters "recorded in history."

Although several of my favorite players have died before the adventures chronicled in Caprice and Rondo, others have taken their places; and some of the familiar stalwarts seem to have grown in stature.

At a reading given in fall 1997 in Kansas City, Dunnett let drop a tantalizing comment: "In the eighth [and last] volume of the House of Niccolo, I plan to link Nicholas with my Lymond Series." For those readers who have read and re-read, multiple times, the volumes in both series, it makes for almost unbearable suspense to find out how the two wilr meet.

Robert C. Jones is a reviewer in Warrensburg, Missouri.