My Series-ous Reading plays the game with Queen of Hearts

 

My apologies for being late with this Series-ous Reading review but as one of my comedians would say, things have just been crazy!

Nevertheless, I did finish my latest Sisters in Sleuthing selection in good time and did have fun along the way.

Queen of Hearts by Rhys Bowen is the eighth entry in the Her Royal Spyness series and has our  1930s leading lady Georgiana “Georgie” Rannoch once again at financial odds. 

While she is number thirty five in line for the British throne. Georgie has no independent wealth of her own and throughly discouraged from making her own way in the world except via marriage. While she is in love with Darcy O’Mara(who is a similar boat, money wise), marrying for love isn’t as simple as it seems.

In sweeps her mother, Claire , a much married woman and former actress hoping to snare a wealthy German into wealthy wedded bliss. She insists that Georgie accompany her to America to divorce her unsuitable current spouse in Reno.

They travel by cruise ship, where Claire meets Cy Goodman, a big time Hollywood producer who thinks that she would be perfect for his next major movie and Georgie is happy to run into Darcy, who is one of his secret missions onboard.

 He’s in search of a jewel thief and suspects Stella Brightwell, famous actress and current paramour of Cy’s since she happens to be around whenever these robberies take place:

By the time they get to America, another theft has occurred but no proof that Stella was involved. Georgie does keep an eye out for trouble, which is not easy to do with her mother looking for some of her own, on and off the set of  the movie that she’s co-starring with Stella in.

When Cy invites everyone to his elaborate country estate for the weekend(including a way too friendly Charlie Chaplin)more problems crop up as his estranged wife decides to make a surprise visit as well.

Things become truly out of hand when Cy is found bludgeoned to death in his library, possibly interrupting the theft of the murder weapon, a gem encrusted candlestick. Could the jewel thief that Darcy’s been after be here with ruby red blood on their hands?

I did enjoy this book as I have the others in this series as Georgie is delightful company and the screwball comedy vibes of these stories are well done. However I just wish that Georgie would take less nonsense from her self centered mother and stuck up for Queenie, her own lady’s maid who Claire cruelly mocks at one point.

Granted, Queenie is not the best at her job(she tends to iron delicate clothes, causing fabric meltdowns) but she is a dutiful soul and felt rightly insulted when Claire laughs at her clad in a red bathing suit(she was going to take a swim in the hotel pool during her off hours, another bone of contention there). 

Georgie just let that happen and it lead to a brief separation between the two and yes, I knew they were going to make up yet I truly despise Claire, who only bothers with her daughter when it’s convenient for her to do so and is the worst kind of phony!

Perhaps in a future outing, Georgie will stand up to Claire but it was annoying to see her mother get all Emily Gilmore at poor Queenie there:

Anyhow, my next Series-ous Reading pick is Stephanie Barron’s Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron. 

While I was less than thrilled with the new film adaptation of Austen’s Persuasion(the script has a big plot hole in the third act due to the omission of a certain character), it did at least give us all a good excuse to talk about Jane Austen and perhaps enjoy more creative takes on her work such as this sleuthing series.

This time around, Austen is visiting Brighton with her newly widowed brother Henry, hoping to ease their mutual loss at this popular seaside retreat. However, a run-in with the infamous Byron proves to be more than a one time encounter as his Lordship is accused of  the murder of a young woman, something that not even the “mad,bad and dangerous to know” nobleman is thought to be capable of.

While they were contemporaries, Austen and Byron didn’t really run in the same social circles and yet it is still fun to imagine the two of them facing off. It’s a notion that Northanger Abbey’s Gothic novel fan Catherine Morland would certainly be frantically page turning by very late candlelight there: