In the meantime I've been reading Steve Brust's work - which is mostly split between his Vlad the Assassin series and five historic books set in the same world. Some of his stuff is as dark and meaty as Cook's, but it's not until Teckla and Phoenix (book 3 and 5) that things get serious - which is a bit odd, skipping book 4, but the books are written out of chronological order and are best read the way they are written (the way it is with Naria).
The first few books read like someone's D&D game, but in Teckla he learns that he's been drifting away from his wife and they hardly know each other now. There's still love there, but he's still entangled in a world of organized crime while she's becoming a revolutionary who wants to overthrow the Empire. In Phoenix, he's asked to assassin someone, does it, and ends the book farther apart from his wife (figuratively and literally). The first couple of books are worth reading to establish the world and who everyone is, but in my opinion they are the weakest ones in the series. There are currently 14 books out, with another 4 planned, in a series written from 1983 to (double checks when the last book came out) 2015.