The Borgias', like the Tudors, very name has become a shorthand for scheming, scandal, audacious ambition and illicit sex. The complexity of their relationships and the breathtaking scale of their hunger for power still captivate us, and it's no surprise that their potential for drama has caught the imagination of Sarah Dunant, who has become the pre-eminent novelist of Renaissance Italy in her last three books.

Blood & Beauty opens with Spanish-born Rodrigo Borgia bribing and charming his way on to the papal throne; from the moment of his triumph, his four illegitimate children become strategic players in his quest to establish the parvenu Borgias alongside Italy's most ancient and powerful ruling families.

Dunant moves with ease from the great salons of power to the intimacies of the bedchamber; she revels in the gorgeous details of clothes, jewels, tapestries and food, while pulling back the velvet curtain on corruption and brutality. So consummate courtier Cesare Borgia rides out to war glittering with wealth, while beneath his costly fabrics his flesh is rotting with syphilis. Lucrezia is partially rehabilitated as a loving girl whose desire to please her relentlessfather too often results in the back-street murders of men she loves.

The Borgias appear as flawed but passionate personalities, painted in all their voluptuous glory against a background of shifting European allegiances. It is a mark of Dunant's skill that these internecine feuds remain intelligible without overwhelming the intimate, human dramas that allow her characters to emerge from the damning gossip of history. Blood & Beauty is a high-class, colourful Renaissance soap opera, and one that will leave readers itching for the next instalment.