13) Kushiel’s Avatar, by Jacqueline Carey

The third and last in the hugely entertaining trilogy by Jacqueline Carey, after her earlier Kushiel’s Dart and Kushiel’s Chosen, set in a medieval world strangely different from ours, but not so different as to be unrecognizable. Carey winds together familiar and completely invented legends for a richly imagined cultural background, and a tale of gripping political intrigue. Here her heroine, Phèdre nò Delaunay, ventures on a rescue mission combined with a quest for knowledge that takes her to a horrendous citadel on the shores of what we know as the Caspian Sea, and then to find the lost tribes of Israel on the shores of the lake we call Lake Victoria. As always the various settings are lushly imagined. And I haven’t even mentioned the kinky sex (though there is less of it in this than the previous two books).