Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie—Georgie to her friends—may be the daughter to the late Duke of Glen Garry and Rannoch, but her brother Binky has cut off her allowance, finances being tight for everyone in the run up to WWII. Finishing school in Switzerland has not equipped Georgie for much in the way of work, so when she ends up alone in the family house in London (not a single maid within hailing distance, imagine), the only way for her to stay fed is to try and get—and stay—gainfully employed. Of course, this must be carried out incognito, for no unmarried female cousin of the Queen, let alone one who’s 34th in line to the throne, should be swanning around unchaperoned in London, let alone working like any pleb.

But Georgie’s troubles just seem to multiply: her stint behind a counter at Harrod’s is scuppered within hours by her neglectful mother. Her attempt at paid housekeeping lands her in even more trouble. And Her Majesty herself has set Georgie an impossible task: to spy on her son, David, and that appalling married American woman he has fallen for. Added to which, everyone seems to be pushing Georgie to marry old Fishface (Prince Siegfried of Romania) when Georgie herself is much taken by a different, albeit equally unsuitable, young aristocrat instead—the delectable Darcy, who’s not only equally penniless, but Irish Catholic to boot. What’s a girl to do?

When Binky comes to town for some unexplained reason and then hops back off to the family castle in Scotland, leaving a dead body in the bathtub of their London house for Georgie to find, things come to a head. Who is this unpleasant and most inconvenient corpse? Has it got something to do with Binky and Georgie’s late father’s gambling debts? The ones that could undo them all?

Her Royal Spyness is a whodunit in the ‘cozy’ tradition, with the emphasis on the character, life and background of the protagonist as much as on the murder/mystery. Lady Georgiana is well fleshed out and fully-developed in this first of a series of novels, while the murder/mystery comes to the fore only halfway into the book. The murderer and motive are not too hard to deduce, the reader being a couple of steps ahead of everyone else, but perhaps for a ‘cozy’, this is not such a big deal. The charm of this book lies in the characters and situations, and for those who have a special interest in the high-jinks of minor British royalty circa 1930s, this would be a delightfully fun and entertaining read.

Agatha Award winning author Rhys Bowen is also the creator of the Constable Evans mystery series set in Wales, and the Molly Murphy mystery series set in turn of the century New York.

Recommended: Yes