The Three Musketeers

What follows draws the four of them into the secret war between the King, the Cardinal, and a beautiful fair-haired spy whose seductive performances hide a branded past. A queen's forbidden love, a duke in London, and twelve diamond studs become the stakes in a game where a piece of jewelry, counted across a crowded ballroom, can decide everything. Richelieu weaves his schemes; Milady plays her parts. And four friends, forever short of money and never short of nerve, ride headlong into all of it.

Dumas writes with wit and swagger and a real feeling for the melancholy beneath his heroes — Athos most of all, whose laughter carries something colder underneath. The romance is genuine, the intrigue tightly wound, and the swordplay lands with the ring of a blade drawn in earnest. Beneath the plumes and the banter, this is a story of what men will risk for one another when the powerful would rather see them divided. The door stands open on that yellow pony's first steps into Meung.