The Cozy Mystery List Blog

The time has come once again for me to continue my many-many-many parts series in which I highlight a repeatedly recommended Cozy mystery series by reading the first entry and giving a brief little synopsis/review. This month, I read the first entry in Rhys Bowen‘s Royal Spyness Mystery Series, Her Royal Spyness.

This series, which is set in 1930s England, stars Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie (Georgie to her friends), the daughter of a duke and a minor royal, 34th in line for the British throne. She comes from a long line of eccentrics, and while her branch of the family retained the titles, they had lost the last vestiges of their once significant wealth in the Great Depression. Naturally, this leaves her with a very complicated relationship with her surviving closer kin.

Georgie is spending time in London to avoid attempts to set her up with unpleasant suitors and trying to find a way to improve her life that doesn’t involve marrying an unpleasant Romanian prince who reminds her of cold fish. She’s staying in the family’s London home alone when she is confronted by Gaston de Mauxville, a Frenchman who claims that her now-deceased father bet the family castle in Scotland on a card game and lost, and now de Mauxville intends to collect. Naturally, he turns up dead in the bath several days later, and naturally, Georgie and her half-brother, the current Duke, were the natural suspects.

This long-running series, which began in 2007 and now contains 18 entries, isn’t the first of Bowen’s long-running mystery series – she’s also the author of the Evan Evans Mystery Series and the Molly Murphy Mystery Series, both of which are also very popular series. This really shows in the writing – often when I am reading one of these ‘first entries’, it can be apparent that the author is still finding their way and that their ‘style’ hasn’t really solidified yet. That isn’t the case here – it’s evident from the beginning that this is the work of an experienced writer.

This book certainly goes into significant detail regarding the lives of the British royal family in the early ’30s. I’m a little rusty on my aristocratic family tree from the early 20th century, so I often needed to frequently look up the relationships between the various royal branches that were being discussed, but more studios anglophiles, and particularly anyone with a particular interest in this period of British history, would certainly find lots of interest in this book. The downside of this is that the mystery does often take something of a backseat – I’ve mentioned before many times that I prefer when a mystery comes out front and center, but here the novel spends a long time discussing Georgie’s personal history and time in London before even a whiff of mystery begins. Fortunately, once it does begin, it proves quite engaging in its own right.

As always, if you want to read more of these brief discussions of some of the more popular Cozy Mystery Series that I’ve written in the past, you can find them at the Most Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page.