The Cardinal's Hat : Money, Ambition, and Everyday Life in the Court of a Borgia Prince - Mary Hollingsworth
The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips

The Cardinal's Hat is essential reading for anyone who has ever spent significant time wondering how a typical Renaissance palace was furnished, or what a nobleman's typical dinner would have included. I realize this is probably a fairly circumscribed group, and and am hence grateful that someone thought this book was worth publishing. It's a fascinating look at the day-to-day minutae of of the life of Ippolito d'Este, much more concerned with the cost of stabling a horse than the political conflicts between the Pope, Holy Roman Emporor, and King of France through which Ippolito moved.

The Egyptologist is a fun novel telling the intertwined stories of an Australian private detective's search for Paul Caldwell, the erstwile illegitimate son of an English brewer, and Ralph Trilipush's search for the tomb of the putative Egyptian pharaoh, Adum-hadu. Told through a series of documents produced by narrators who become more and more obviously unreliable as the story progresses, it's a fun exercise in reading between the lines, until the author wimps out and reveals all in the final few pages.