THE DISORDERLY KNIGHTS

Brilliant, brawe and bonny Francis Crawford of Lymond has matched wits and swords with traitors in two earlier books: The Game of Kings (1961) and Queen's Play (1964). In The Disorderly Knights he appears fresh from service to the Queen Dowager at the French court to become involved in the most challenging duel of all. His enemy is Sir Graham (Gabriel) Reid Malett, seemingly saintly, greatly gifted Knight of the Order of St. John. The time is 1551, when the Turks assaulted Malta, and Lymond is there to help the Order, and to try to save Oonagh O'Dwyer, an old love and former mistress of the Irish leader O'Connor, presently in a liaison with the cowardly Governor of Gozo, and who is bearing Lymond's child. After the Malta episode ends disastrously, Gabriel joins Lymond in Scotland, where Lymond heads St. Mary's, a fighting force Mary of Guise fears, and which Gabriel ostensibly hopes will save the Order, but for which he has darker uses in mind.... His beautiful sister Joleta is equally sinister under a surface chastity and almost costs Lymond his life as well as his honor. Miss Dunnett remains courageous in the face of complication and circumstance, but her villain manages to escape her as well as the hero. Still, she has penned another spirited pastiche of history and melodrama which has some claim to elegance and will make one on a readership addicted to rhetoric, romance and high minded heroics.