| Pawn in Frankincense: Fourth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles | 
 enlarge | Author: Dorothy Dunnett
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 74004
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0679777466
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780679777465
ASIN: 0679777466
Publication Date: June 24, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Nice copy, ex-library, some cover wear. 100% satisfaction guarantee with every purchase! All sales benefit the hungry and homeless in the St. Louis area as well as Hurricane Katrina victims and neglected animals across the nation.
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Product Description
For the first time Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles are available in the United States in quality paperback editions.
Pawn in Frankincense is the fourth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles. Somewhere within the bejeweled labyrinth of the Ottoman empire, a child is hidden. Now his father, Francis Crawford of Lymond, soldier of fortune and the exiled heir of Scottish nobility, is searching for him while ostensibly engaged on a mission to the Turkish Sultan. At stake is a pawn in a cutthroat game whose gambits include treason, enslavement, and murder. With a Foreword by the author.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Wonderful May 9, 2008
The Lymond series is perhaps my favorite series of books. I love them all. Especially on the second (and third and fourth) read. I especially love Pawn for it's darker side; and it's focus on the Middle East.
All of Dunnett's writing is about character development--in Pawn we learn so much about the characters and their deepest, darkest sides. Lymond goes so far over the line that you wonder how he ever comes back.
The book's action also takes place almost exclusively in the Middle East. Because of Dunnett's historical accuracy, it paints a vivid portrait of a world entirely removed from Renaissance Europe--and a glimpse into the history of a region that Americans have been trying to understand since September 11th.
A great book.
Book #4 in the Lymond Chronicles and a definite WOW book February 22, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Pawn in Frankincense opens up shortly after the end of The Disorderly Knights, as Jerrott and Philippa track down Lymond on his search to find Francis' child, stolen by renegade Knight Graham Reed Malett and hidden somewhere in the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Francis uses his position as an emissary of France delivering gifts to Suleiman the Magnificent as an entree into the mysterious world of the east as he and his companions continue their desperate search for Lymond's son. However, the deliciously evil Graham's schemes lead them on from one false lead to another, as the web is spun to bring Francis and troops further into Graham's evil web. Nothing and no one is as they seem, and the author throws many red herrings and surprises into her tale and eventually we discover that there are two blond, blue eyed children being sought. One child is Francis', who is father of the other?
Although separated, Lymond and his followers all end up in Constantinople, as Graham's plots come to fruition and Lymond, Jerrott, Archie and the mysterious Marthe with the striking resemblance to Lymond begin the fight of their lives in a real life chess game with deadly consequences for any who are "captured", and Francis battles to maintain his wits against the deadly addiction Graham's schemes have unknowingly afflicted him with.
As with the first three books in the series, Francis Crawford is a fascinating hero, and is as suave, debonair, flawed and fascinating as only a 16th Century version of James Bond could be. This book is filled with non-stop action and suspense and ends with quite a big surprise of a cliffhanger which will send the reader reaching for the next book in the series, The Ringed Castle (Lymond Chronicles, 5). A solid five stars and my favorite so far in the series.
Pawn In Frankincense Review November 6, 2007
This is a fascinating and mesmerizing continuance of the saga of Francis Crawford of Lymond. We find him far from his troubled homeland of Scotland in search of his infant son, in the 16th Century Mediterranean region. Many old friends appear (and disappear) including Jerott, Salablanca, the mysterious Marthe and the evil Gabriel. Young Phillipa Somerville, who accompanied Lymond to take care of the child when he is found, is forced into a Turkish harem. The unforgettable final battle is larger than reality, with the parties posing as chess pieces in a genuine game of life or death. This book is written in such a visually descriptive manner you feel as though you were present. A can't miss read!!
Lymond Series No 4: DO NOT READ THIS ONE FIRST September 6, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the fourth book in a series which you will either love or hate.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES READ IT BEFORE YOU HAVE READ THE FIRST THREE.
The saga of Francis Crawford of Lymond is one of those multi-book series which must if at all possible be read in the right order, which is
1) The Game of Kings
2) Queen's Play
3) The Disorderly Knights
4) Pawn in Frankincense
5) The Ringed Castle
6) Checkmate
This book mostly takes place in the mediteranean area and 16th century Istanbul and in some ways it is the climax of the series, particularly of the battle of wits between Lymond and Gabriel.
While all the books in the series have titles influenced by Chess, this is the one which actually features a literal chess game which is possibly the most memorable in any work of literature and has continued to influence books and films for decades.
(Think of the Wizard Chess game at the climax of "Harry Potter and the Philospher's stone" but this is much darker and more adult.)
There are two reasons why this series, and indeed the author's similar "Niccolo" series, should be read in chronological order. The first is that the plots are incredibly complicated and if you read them out of sequence you have no chance of understanding what is going on.
The second is that many of the characters meet their deaths in ways which are exceptionally unpleasant both for themselves and for the characters who survive them. That point particularly applies to "Pawn in Frankincense". This book features the very disturbing killings of several key characters in the series. If you read this one before any of the first three books, knowledge of how those characters are going to die, and the effect it will have on surviving characters, is likely to be a major "spoiler" which will significantly impact on the pleasure you would otherwise have had in reading about them for the first time when you do get around to reading the earlier books.
Like the books, the central character, Francis Crawford of Lymond, is brilliant, violent, and extremely complicated. Unlike the books he is very flawed. Lymond is a mercenary with particular interests in Scotland and France, and gets involved in nefarious deeds all over the world as 16th century Europeans knew it. Dunnett brings the splendour, cultural ferment, and violent cruelty of the Renaissance world splendidly to life.
If you are at all squeamish, or do not like having to make your brain work overtime to follow a book, leave this series alone. Lymond's story is neither "chewing gum for the brain" nor a comfortable read. And even if you prefer flawed heroes to knights in shining armour, Lymond may infuriate you from time to time. But if you can put up with these features, these books will richly reward the effort you make in reading them.
There is no middle ground: you will either hate the Lymond series or recognise these books as one of the greatest works of historical fiction ever written. Or very possibly both !
 missing something? May 12, 2006
Dorothy Dunnett is my favourite kind of novelist: someone you know is smarter than you are. She's got all the multicoloured strands of plot in her hand; they're all going to come together and make sense in a smashing finale, even though you can't see how that's possibly going to happen. She not only says interesting things but says them in interesting ways, ways you wouldn't have thought of. All this makes reviewing (other than the "wow" variety) rather difficult, because if you find something you think is wrong, you just might not be smart enough to see what she's actually doing.
The strengths of this book are prodigious: chiefly the plot and the descriptive detail. Perhaps this is what is meant by "historical novel." Dunnett achieves heroic feats of research in order to write a page, a paragraph!, about Aleppo or Constantinople. From sights to sounds to smells to unpleasant tastes, you will know what it was like to travel the Mediterranean in the 1550's. Locations are rendered in almost obsessive complexity.
Here's where my reservations come in. I'm just not sure if, finishing the book, you'll know what it was like to be a person in the mid-1550's, or to think in the mid-1550's. These people don't behave or think a lot differently than we do. They love, they drink (all except Lymond), they are periodically confused, and they just happen to be roaming through exotic places and having people who hate them pour limitless resources into crafting elaborate schemes for 1) their immediate death, which they miraculously (not a light word here, folks, I mean miraculously) fight their way out of, or 2) their exquisite psychological pain. The description--mind-bogglingly researched and I assume brilliantly accurate. The plot--run by an author who knows where everything's headed. The characters and zeitgeist--curiously under-developed and hollow-at-the-core for a historical series of this, justified, fame. For instance, can you in good faith write an historical novel that takes place squarely in the middle of the Reformation and have but none of the characters driven by religious motives? I'm scratching my head over that one.
"Pawn in Frankincense" is my second Dunnett novel. I utterly adored "The Game of Kings" but had similar reservations. Many of the characters seemed to be the vehicles of wit and plot--here, setting and plot. The edition I read of "Pawn" boasted in its jacket notes that the book was full-blown myth. I agree. Myth and elaborate psychological characterization are mutually exclusive, however.
Read this book for the plot--the jaw-dropping climactic game of chess, the sympathetic chain of surprises throughout, the traps both sides lay for each other (and for you!). Read it for the setting, if you're interested in the 1500's in general and the geography and sociology of the Islamic East in particular. Read it for the archetypes out of which historical romances are made: the mysteriously tortured but omnipotent leading man, the woman and child in danger.
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