Blood and Beauty (Sangue e onore: i Borgia), Sarah Dunant

Dunant raises the curtain on Rodrigo Borgia's election as Pope Alexander VI in 1492: through the Borgias' trademark guile, charm and cruelty he has claimed for himself the most powerful position on earth. He also openly maintains a household of four illegitimate children by Vannozza dei Catanei – among them the infamous Lucrezia, still a child but already being haggled over by rival dynasties – and a new and beautiful mistress. This is the Italy of Michelangelo and Pinturicchio: in Ferrara Bembo is writing sonnets and in Milan Leonardo is modelling his doomed sculpture of Francesco Sforza. But it is also the turbulent land of Savonarola and Machiavelli; the incubator of syphilis and the birthplace of the siege engine, an agglomeration of rival dukedoms, principalities and republics that encompasses some of the most viciously disputed territory in man's history.

In the 10 years covered by Blood and Beauty, Borgia Rome has to negotiate with the armies of the French king Charles VIII, and the great ruling families of divided Italy – "a sack of spatting cats that has learned nothing from the past" – through diplomacy and marriage, poison and charm. At the same time, Alexander has to manage his own unruly household: treacherous servants, a dangerously passionate daughter, and wilful, warring sons, trained from birth to fight their way to power.

From the outset Dunant takes possession of her sprawling, unwieldy material. She sets up a resonant dynamic between the political – the dangerous machinations of the papal conclave - and the domestic. In the new Pope's overflowing illegitimate household in Santa Maria del Portico, his young mistress washes her long golden hair and his ripening daughter dreams of romance as the Borgia machine barters her virginity away.

Among a broad cast of characters, delineated with a satisfyingly firm hand, are the great paterfamilias Alexander, Falstaffian, uxorious, charming and ruthless; the sinister master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchardt; and the handsome, vicious Cesare, who matures marvellously from a rake decked out in the latest fashions to a savage melancholic, mired in violence and dressed in black. And while Dunant's reclamation of the infamous Lucrezia from incestuous whore to maternal romantic whose fertility is used by powerful men as a bargaining tool robs her somewhat of her imaginative power, it is almost certainly closer to the truth.

If the careful path, too, that Dunant treads between intelligent historical analysis and shameless romp very occasionally veers into Carry On Lucrezia territory (Naples is described as "a place of heat and moist passageways"), on balance this only adds to the gaiety of the enterprise. But it is in her asides that Dunant finally triumphs, like all good novelists: in a deft, shrewd, precise use of killer detail. When she casually mentions the Baglioni family, "one half of whom massacred the other in their beds, under cover of a wedding reception", the ambassadors to the Vatican gossiping like village women, or the sheer labour of counting out the 100,000 ducats' dowry for Lucrezia's third marriage while the bride maintains her fixed smile under the painted ceilings of the Vatican palace, it is difficult not to look forward to the next ride on an old-fashioned rollercoaster of a story.