As a long-time aficionado of the works of the late great Scottish historical novelist, Dorothy Dunnett, I've adopted my username as a small way of promoting her magnificent novels, which need to find a greater following in a new generation of readers.
If you haven't encountered the ultimate Byronic Renaissance hero, the 16th century Scottish mercenary, nobleman, and sometime spy, Francis Crawford of Lymond, you're in for a treat. The Lymond Chronicles are an extraordinary six-book emotional roller coaster of action, intrigue, suspense and romance, as Lymond deals with the courts of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, from Henri II and Catherine de Medici to Tsar Ivan the Terrible and Sulieman the Magnificent, while never forgetting his home country of Scotland.
Or you can try your hand at The House of Niccolò, an eight-volume series about Lymond's ancestors in the 15th century. Exploring the development of Renaissance trade, finance, culture and the beginnings of the age of discovery, the novels follow Niccolò's adventures as he builds a merchant bank that eventually does business from Bruges and the Italian city-states to points as far afield as Persia and the Black Sea to Iceland and Timbuktu.
And then there's King Hereafter (publisher link), Dunnett's raw, gripping telling of the story of the real Macbeth, according to the historical evidence she meticulously assembled.
For lovers of historical fiction who want exciting, powerful tales, rich with accurate historical detail, populated with unforgettable characters, and written by a master prose stylist, Dunnett's novels are in a class that perhaps only Patrick O'Brian has been able to match in the second half of the 20th century.
Several lively internet e-mail discussion groups exist, the largest of which is the Marzipan group on Yahoo!Groups. You can also visit the Dorothy Dunnett Reader's Association at http://www.ddra.org and follow the DDRA on twitter at DunnettCentral.