Tag: royal related fiction

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: Heir Apparent

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Now considering that I finished the new Olivia Dade last week this may be a surprise to you, but you all know I like Olivia Dade and Second Chance Romance was indeed great fun, but Heir Apparent is a new release and I enjoyed it although I have some quibbles as you will see so I have things to say about it that you won’t have heard before!

Lexi Villiers is living in Tasmania and in the middle of training to be a doctor. She’s busy building an independent life for her herself. But on New Years Day a helicopter lands and her grandmother’s right-hand man steps out to tell her that her father and her twin brother are dead and she needs to come home. Lexi’s grandmother is the queen of England and Lexi is now next in line for the throne. She’s got to decide if she wants to return to the family fold – and if she does she’s got to figure out how to get the British public to warm up to her and how to deal with the scheming that surrounds the monarchy, particularly from her father’s younger brother Prince Richard who is next in line after Lexi.

So in case you’re wondering, in the world of Heir Apparent, Charles II’s wife died and he remarried to his mistress Barbara Villiers, who then acted as Regent when Charles died before their eldest son was of age. This means that Armitage has been able to invent her own cast of characters and a distinct history for the House of Villiers, but as a reader you can also spend time spotting where she’s taken inspiration from the real British royals. So Lexi’s mother died young after an acrimonious divorce from her father, who went on to marry his mistress. You get the idea.

This is a really fun and page turning read – partly because of how much fun it is looking at those parallels to the real royals. I really enjoyed it – right until the end where I don’t think it quite stuck the landing. I really can’t explain why without giving huge, huge spoilers, but I suspect that other people may feel the same as me. It’s a great sun-lounger read right up until that point though, and I don’t even think that the ending issue is because Armitage is leaving room for a sequel. So that’s frustrating. But your mileage may vary on that ending – and you won’t know until you’ve read it! If nothing else it will make for a debate at all the book club meetings – and it’s a Reese’s Book Club pick so it’ll be popular on that front.

I got my copy from NetGalley and as it only came out on Tuesday last week I haven’t had a chance to look for it in the bookshops yet, but I will report back in when I do but it should be really easy to get hold of in the US because of that Reese pick. It’s also available on Kindle and Kobo and as an audiobook.

Book previews, new releases

Out This Week: New Royal Spyness

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After talking about the new H M The Queen Investigates book a couple of weeks ago, today it’s the turn of another Royal-related historical mystery series – Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness books which has reached number 19 – with From Cradle to Grave – which came out on Tuesday. I remain surprised and delighted that Bowen continues to find more set ups for murders for Georgie to solve, but also that she’s continuing to put out multiple books a year despite being in her 80s. Anyway the blurb for this latest installment has nanny problems (more accurately sister in law problems) as well as a string of deaths which may threaten Georgie’s beloved husband Darcy. I am up to date with this series – and always wonder if the next book will be the last but surely Bowen wouldn’t finish on a strange number like 19 when 20 is right there? Right?

binge reads, series

Bingeable series: Her Majesty The Queen Investigates

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The latest of these came out last week and as I recently binge read the three books I thought it would be a good time to make a post about them.

So the premise – as the series name suggests – is that the (late) Queen subtly helps solve some murders that have occurred in her vicinity. Set a few years back – when she was in her early 90s, she uses her assistant Rozie to do the investigating she can’t do. In the first in the series, The Windsor Knot, the victim is an overnight guest at Windsor and it’s a bit of a closed group sort of thing. In the second, our the victim is a staff member, found dead by the side of the Buckingham Palace swimming pools. And in the third it’s the brother of a neighbouring aristo to the Sandringham estate.

I think the first book and the third book are stronger than the second, but given that I binge read the series I can’t say that the issues with the second book put me off. For me these work best when the problems they are solving seem the most organic – I can’t quite work out why but the second book felt much more contrived and complicated than the first one – and the third one, for all that the third is out and about all over Norfolk.

But they are all easy to read, with nice details about the royal residences involved (there really is a swimming pool at Buckingham palace – who knew?!) and enough real bits and bobs about the Queen’s life and family to feel like the person you think you know through the media. I did wonder what would happen now that Elizabeth II has died, but they are set in the mid 2010s and at the end of book three it says there is a fourth book coming so there will be one more at least, and I will be looking out for it.

As I said earlier, the new book is out now in hardback – in fact as I write this Amazon has the hardback as a Black Friday deal. I do think you need to read them in order though – but the good news is that the first in the series is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment – so if you’re a member you can read it for free. The second one has a different title in the US – so be careful of that because it’s easy to think it might be a fourth one you haven’t spotted, but the actual fourth one isn’t out until early 2024. But if you’ve enjoyed things like the Royal Spyness series, this might be the contemporary cozy crime equivalent you have been looking for.

Happy reading!