The Unicorn Hunt

Name: The Unicorn Hunt
Rating: 4.6 (518 reviews)

by Dorothy Dunnett Book 5 in the House of Niccolo series.

First published 1993

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4.6(518)

In 1468, Nicholas enters Scotland under the cover of expanding his banking and trading interests while pursuing answers about his wife Gelis, their child and his own disputed parentage. His schemes extend through Edinburgh, the Tyrol, Egypt and Cyprus and entangle the courts and financiers of northern Europe. Commercial strategy becomes a private duel as Nicholas discovers that control of information cannot protect him from every betrayal.

Nicholas’s commercial network allows him to cross borders that armies and nobles cannot, but it also spreads the consequences of his private conflict across several courts. Banking, mining and shipping become tools in a contest with Gelis that neither can keep separate from their child.

The search for Nicholas’s parentage adds another form of uncertainty. A man skilled at constructing identities through money and information discovers that his own inheritance may depend on evidence controlled by other people, making family history one problem he cannot simply outmanoeuvre.