Davies, Robertson. The Lyre of Orpheus.

NY: Viking, 1989.

This set of three novels more closely resembles a triptych than the usual sort of trilogy. The first published volume, The Rebel Angels, and this one are the side panels while the middle volume, What’s Bred in the Bone, forms the middle panel. That middle book tells in detail of the multifaceted life of Francis Cornish, while the first and third volumes are both set after his death and deal with the effects Francis’s life has had on his friends and colleagues.

Pope, Dudley. Ramage’s Devil.

London: Secker & Warburg, 1982.

This 13th adventure in the career of Capt. Lord Nicholas Ramage of the Royal Navy follows the pattern of the previous several volumes in taking what could have been two or three short stories, each with its entirely separate plot, and sort of jamming them together to form a somewhat disjointed novel that’s not entirely successful. Ramage, the Protestant heir to an earldom, has finally come to terms with the reality that Gianna, the gorgeous young Catholic Italian countess he rescued from Bonaparte’s cavalry a dozen books ago, is not going to be someone he could ever marry — and, in any case, she’s taken advantage of the lull in the war resulting from the ill-advised Treaty of Amiens (1801) to try to slip back into Volterra and resume ruling her little country.