In London, in 1882, sixteen-year-old Becky Winter gets her first tutoring job: she’s to teach German (her first language) to a girl named Adelaide, who’s a few years older than Becky, and who needs tutoring in more than just German, it turns out. Though she’s married to the prince of a tiny kingdom called Razkavia, Adelaide’s no noblewoman: first a servant, then a whore, she’s street-smart and clever but can’t read or write in English, let alone any other languages. Meanwhile, Jim Taylor, detective, has been looking for Adelaide for ten years (since the action described in The Ruby in the Smoke took place) and has finally found her; he makes it a point to make himself useful to her husband the prince, who could use some protection and assistance: Razkavia is tiny, but it has a fair bit of political intrigue, and the prince isn’t safe from spies and assassination attempts, even in London. When Prince Rudolf’s brother actually is assassinated, the prince and his wife must head to Razkavia for the funeral, and Jim and Becky are invited along to help, Becky as tutor to Adelaide and Jim as detective for Rudolf, to figure out who killed his brother and what exactly’s going on in the kingdom. This suits Becky just fine: she and her mother are actually exiles from Razkavia (Becky had no idea the prince was a prince when he hired her to tutor his wife) and Becky’s got a taste for adventure: this description of her, from early in the book, made me smile: “She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make so with coffee, and pencils, and verbs. But there was a consolation in the verbs. She was genuinely fascinated by how languages worked, and if she couldn’t live with a band of robbers in a Sicilian cave, she was prepared to study linguistics and philology at university” (2-3).
So the party heads to Razkavia, accompanied by Count and Countess Thalgau—the Razkavian ambassador to Britain and his wife—and Adelaide, despite being a commoner, is accepted by Rudolf’s father, King Wilhelm (though not without a few tense moments!). But (spoiler alert, sort of, but not really because there’s a Razkavian royal family tree at the front of the book, with birth/death dates) when the king, who’s ill anyhow, dies, there’s more plotting and violence, and Rudolf ends up dead too: which makes Adelaide queen. Which is’t something she ever bargained for. But watching Adelaide blossom as a ruler, as she’s given a chance to run things and use her intelligence, is really satisfying: she has to work hard to learn German and remember etiquette, but she’s good at reading people and has a flair for political strategy. Meanwhile, plots keep on thickening left and right: Razkavia is tiny but has some useful mines, and both Germany and Austria-Hungary would like to acquire it for themselves. There’s much fighting and suspense and adventure and betrayal, and I found the book quite impossible to put down: I read it in big gulps on Saturday and Sunday, waiting for Hurricane Irene to arrive and then pass. (Here in my part of Brooklyn things were not bad: some downed trees but none in our immediate vicinity, one leaky window in our apartment, and a sleepless noisy hour from 3-4 am between the wind and the rain and the leak.)
But the joys of this book weren’t just in the action: there are some great descriptive passages, too. I loved this whole list of a paragraph about Adelaide and Becky and Jim’s arrival in Razkavia:
Drifts of steam in the nighttime station, a red carpet, bowing officials doffing top hats, servants hastening to unload trunks and valises into a pair of carriages. Mourning: everyone in black, flags at half-mast for the dead crown prince. But from the public squares and gardens, from the Rose Labyrinth in the Spanish Gardens at the bend in the river, came the sound of jolly music as the bands (paid for by a music tax on tourists) oompahed their way through Weber and Strauss and Suppé; and the great cathedral bell tolling, tolling endlessly, and more bells striking the hour from the ancient churches in the little streets and squares. Cigar smoke in the air, and the scent of spring flowers, and the aroma of spicy stews and sauerkraut and grilling meat. The vastly overhanging eaves of the old buildings they passed under; balconies overflowing with scarlet geraniums; the lighted windows of beer cellars and cafés, replete with antlers and stuffed badgers and every kind of hunting trophy. (53-54)
PS: though the cover bills this as “A Sally Lockhart Mystery,” Sally herself is hardly in the book. But I was OK with that. Jim’s excellent enough on his own, and besides, Sally isn’t really a detective—she was thrown into it, in the past books, so it’s fair enough that she gets a break.
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