59 books like Pawn in Frankincense

This book was my introduction to Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. I picked it up at a library sale and was immediately caught up in its portrayal of Francis Crawford, a Scottish adventurer who ends up at the court of Ivan the Terrible. Based loosely on the diary of Sir Jerome Horsey, it represents an older understanding of how Muscovite Russia operated, but it’s a great adventure told with vivid details and remarkable characters, still my favorite among the six books in this series.

In the character of Francis Crawford of Lymond, Dorothy Dunnett created one of the most memorable heroes in historical fiction. I lived for the next book in the series. Lymond was mercurial, malicious, loving, insouciant, flawed, and fearless – and yet believable and very human. Dunnett brought 16th-century Scotland and the borderlands to life, even to the songs and the literature. It was a world entirely real to the reader and one in which, despite unexpected tragedy, elsewhere in the story, there could be a sense of humor.

I have always been interested in the Jack the Ripper lore. If you feel the same, Stalking Jack the Ripper does not disappoint. The book follows Audrey Rose Wadsworth in Victorian-era England as she hunts Jack the Ripper. Audrey is not the typical Victorian lady. She has a passion for forensic medicine and doesn’t mind the sight of corpses. Maniscalco does a fantastic job of presenting the widely known case details while putting her own spin on it and even adding a few details.

I loved learning about what happened in Italy when the Germans occupied it. In this story, a wealthy Italian family becomes too close to the Germans by inviting them to search the secret ruins behind their villa for antiquities. This relationship has deadly consequences years later as members of the family are killed. The book goes back and forth between 1943 and 1955 until we learn why someone is seeking revenge.  

So, making this list has rather reminded me that there is a major dearth of queer books in historical romance. Especially of the happy variety—and it’s not a true romance if it doesn’t have an HEA.

I could easily have included The Song of Achilles or Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café or Patience and Sarah, but they wouldn’t have fit the Regency/Victorian time period I was aiming for and they also either have very hidden/obscured queerness (e.g. Fried Green Tomatoes) or no HEA (Song of Achilles, obvs).

I’m going with Lord John even though he’s Georgian era because 1) he has a happy and fulfilling life despite his One True Love ultimately being unrequited, 2) he has some great love affairs and adventures, and 3) best of all this is a series. And a series is almost as good as an HEA!

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You gotta give props to Flewelling, who wrote a fantasy series with queer male protags in 1996! Just imagine – before Will & Grace, before Queer as Folk, before gay marriage was even a thing, she had the courage to write this deeply moving spy espionage fantasy book and the relationship between the noble rogue Seregil and his mentee/lover Alec was basically what I used as a model for every romantic relationship in my life. Also, the protag in my first two books was named Alek. Coincidence? I think not.

Who knew that an account of a disappeared medieval world could be so gripping?

I’ve always regarded history as a literary and intellectual exercise, and Pulitzer-winning Barbara Tuchman has been my model ever since I picked up this absorbing history of a Europe riven by war, climate catastrophes, plague, and religious schisms.

Academic historians might denigrate Tuchman’s approach, but through pen-portraits and narrative momentum, Tuchman immersed me in a world that had subtle echoes of today.

This book tells the story of the wars of the Roses through the lens of one family – the Pastons. This family left an extraordinary archive of letters, and it included many fascinating characters, especially women. The Paston women fought off sieges on their houses, wrote Valentine letters to their husbands, ran off with servants, and managed complicated household finances. As a family, the Pastons were social climbers, who tried to get on at court and to improve their position. Through them, we hear about high politics, but also about the domestic life and loves of the gentry in the fifteenth century. In this book, Helen Castor writes a kind of family biography, expansive, gripping, and detailed. It is both first-class research and a great story.

Finishing Titus Groan, the first volume of the Gormenghast series, made me feel as though I was one of the few people to have scaled a towering, oddly-shaped mountain.

Set in the sprawling, half-ruined Castle Gormenghast, Titus Groan centers on the constrained, almost frozen relations between a declining noble family and their many servants, some of whom strain against the social order with all the energy of Satan in Paradise Lost.

Peake’s work is by turns inspiring and maddening: he would turn a phrase or describe a scene in such an arresting way that I couldn’t imagine how he pulled it off; at other times, I scratched my head at the loosely plotted, self-indulgent writing. But I’ve also never read anything like the Gormenghast series: Peake has such a gift for arresting imagery and wordplay that his work seems like a novel-length set of Edward Gorey drawings.

I love this book because I'm a sucker for a well-written redemption story.

Sebastian kidnaps one of Evie's best friends because he wants to force her to marry him, and in the beginning, he has few redeemable qualities. Evie marries him for protection from her awful family. Sebastian doesn't expect her to stand up to him. He doesn't expect to be fascinated by her. And he definitely doesn't expect to want to bed her more than once.

He is shocked when she refuses to cave to his charm. Evie gives him a purpose, and he cannot help wanting to earn her love. His story arc and growth are perfectly executed.