The Cardinal's Blades, The Alchemist in the Shadows, by Pierre Pevel

Pevel's series will envelope the reader in seventeenth-century Paris, but it's not our Paris, because here be dragons. If you look these books up on Amazon.com, you may see some snotty comments (I don't know how else to describe them) which say, "This is just The Three Musketeers with dragons." No, it isn't. Brush off [...]