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R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale Trilogy.
I don't know why this fell out of popular culture, but it's excellent and I haven't read a writer who writes better combat.
I haven't read this. Curious as to the combat. What makes it good? Is this one on one combat or are we talking about troops facing each other? Or both?
It's based on D&D (but doesn't require any knowledge or lean on the game strongly at all), so it's small party combat.
I just think it's so visercal, so well-defined without being dry. At all times I felt like the picture of the fights was really being painted blow by blow, including deft movements and tactical thinking. It was never "they exchanged blows," it was always "Drizzt turned in perfect time to evade the hammer's swing, and maneuvered between the legs of the larger man to send the jagged edge of his blade through the man's back," only much much better because R.A. Salvatore is 100x better a writer than I am.
Just please don't make a grimdark Drizzt clone at your next D&D game!
My rec goes to Erin M Evans' Brimstone Angels series. Another set in the Forgotten Realms starring two tiefling twins and their dragonborn adoptive father. One of the twins accidentally stumbles into a warlock pact with a devil, and the series is largely about dealing with the consequences of that.
It's so well written with excellent characters. And when the final two books go to the dragonborn kingdom of Tymanther, an area and culture comparatively unexplored by FR canon, Evans gets to really bust out her worldbuilding chops and put her background in anthropology background to good use.
The good thing is, IMO you don't need a very big investment to decide if it's right for you. If you get through the prologue of book one and aren't interested, it's not for you. Evans does an amazing job of condensing her style, tone, and themes into the prologue of her books specifically for that reason (and because the first few actual chapters are often slightly different in tone).
If you've read the 2014 PHB, you've already read some of it. The quotes in the tiefling section and dragonborn section come from the prologue to the first book and from the 4th book, respectively.
Only downside is, last time I looked, you literally cannot get the first book in paper. It's ebook or audiobook only, since it's been out of print for a long time and second-hand copies go for instance amounts. When I looked, the rest of the series was easy, but that may have changed; it's been like 8 years.