Bertie and the Seven Bodies
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The second entry of the Bertie, Prince of Wales mystery series, featuring future King Edward VII, Albert Edward, as an amateur sleuth solving suspicious murders in Victorian England.
Bertie, Prince of Wales, is delighted to be invited by Lady Amelia, a recently widowed young woman, to Desborough Hall for a week-long shooting party. The eleven other motley guests include a poet, a chaplain, and an Amazon explorer. The party promises a week of shooting, socializing, and feasting, but these expectations are soon shattered as one of the guests collapses face first into her dessert and dies before the night is out. At first, this death is believed to be an accident, and the party continues with their hunting plans for the week. But when another guest turns up dead the very next day, Bertie realizes that the deaths cannot be coincidence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When a killer stalks a dinner-and-gameshooting party on an English country estate, the corpses drop like pheasants. High-living Albert Edward (``Bertie''), Prince of Wales, who made his detective debut in Lovesey's Bertie and the Tinman , is the fumbling sleuth and rakish narrator, loosely modeled on the real-life prince who became King Edward VII. Bertie discovers that the nursery rhyme ``Monday's child is fair of face . . . '' holds the key; each line of the poem points to the next victim. Among the dwindling group of party guests, one of whom is the murderer, are an Amazon explorer, a stuttering poet and a scheming actress. Half the fun of this romp lies in watching Bertie invent, then discard, one theory after another; for a while his suspicions even fall on the widowed hostess he wants to bed. The other half comes from Lovesey's light mockery of Victorian manners and sexual mores in a bright, entertaining tale whose bantering tone conceals artful plotting.
