REVENGE, SERVED ROYAL, third in the Lady Petra Inquires series

REVENGE, SERVED ROYAL (Lady Petra Inquires #3)
CELESTE CONNALLY
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Bridgerton meets Agatha Christie in this dazzling third instalment to the captivating Regency-era Lady Petra Inquires mystery series.

September, 1815. Autumn is in the air as Lady Petra Forsyth and some of the most illustrious members of the ton descend upon Windsor Castle for a week of royal celebrations, with the highlight being Queen Charlotte’s inaugural patisserie contest for the best bakers employed by England’s finest houses. Not only is Lady Petra’s own cook one of the contestants, but Her Majesty has requested that Petra herself serve as one of the judges.

Petra’s happiness at tasting delicious cakes and biscuits only increases at finding her beloved Aunt Ophelia in attendance at Windsor, as well as Sir Rufus Pomeroy. As England’s most famous former royal chef-turned-cookbook author, Sir Rufus is slated to present his best recipes to the Queen during the festivities, with Petra being granted an early viewing in the royal library.

Yet upon arrival, Petra instead encounters a frantic housemaid pointing to a body of one of Her Majesty’s guests—and to the valet still tugging at the silk ribbon used to strangle the victim. What’s more, the valet turns out to be Oliver Beecham, the ne’er-do-well brother of Petra’s own lady’s maid, Annie. But as Oliver is hauled away to the dungeons, he protests his innocence, claiming the late guest argued with several aristocrats, including the Prince Regent and Petra’s Aunt Ophelia, and boasted about hiding a potentially scandalous document within the vastness of Windsor Castle.

When some poisoned tea meant for Petra is consumed by one of her fellow judges, it’s clear the real killer is still walking the castle’s halls. Indeed, in order to prove the innocence of Annie’s brother and find the incriminating document, Petra will need to act like a lady, eat like a chef, and think like one of Her Majesty’s best spies before a murderer can turn the celebrations from sweet to royally deadly.

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My Review: I experienced this as GBBO in 1815, featuring a much, much nastier Paul Hollywood in Sir Rufus Pomeroy. While Petra is his co-judge (there are others but I forget who they are) in Queen Charlotte's version of a baking contest, I'm more inclined to call her kindly, sweet Mary Berry than Prue Leith.

When Sir Rufus is offed, ugly secrets come out about him causing Lady Petra to reconsider her lifelong attachment to him. Everyone decides to blame Oliver (Lady Petra's maid's brother, so feudal family)for the death. The hunt is on for the real killer...and it's quite a hunt. Lots of people, including me and Lady Petra's Aunt Ophelia, had hard words about and with Sir Rufus. No one is sorry he's dead. We're at Windsor Castle with the Royal Family in residence. There is an immense pool of people to draw suspects from. One person exempt from that was Duncan, Lady Petra's honeybunch. He's offscreen a lot this iteration, too much so for my taste.

The sheer complexity of the naming conventions, thus styles of address, among the titled cluttering up the pages requires attention to be paid. "Lord Doohickey" is also "His Grace the Duke of Thattaway"; forgetting that can lead to great confusion. The shifts were tonal, representing different situations and relationships. I'd love a peek at Author Connally's spreadsheets to see how this all nested together in the writing process. Another thing I'd love to see is this anachronistic GBBO clone on screen! The glorious descriptions of the foods, the added bonus of silly royal pageantry, everyone dressed to the nines all the time...wouldn't Netflix do this right? Hmm?

There is the upholding of Ma'at, there is the outing of the real actor behind the masks worn by multiple people, maybe even too many, but of course the crime is punished. It's why mysteries appeal to readers: the crime is punished.

This time quite fairly in my view. Enjoy the first two books before this one if you want a bit of a leg-up with the characters' names; if not, you'll work a little harder but still have good fun.

ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND TREACHERY, Regency-era mystery twofer with satisfying conclusions

ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND TREACHERY
CELESTE CONNALLY
Minotaur Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Bridgerton meets Agatha Christie in this dazzling next installment in a captivating Regency-era mystery series with a feminist spin.

21 June, 1815. London may be cheering the news of Napoleon’s surrender at Waterloo, but Lady Petra Forsyth has little to celebrate after discovering that the death of her viscount fiancé three years earlier was no accident. Instead, it was murder, and the man responsible is her handsome, half-Scottish secret paramour Duncan Shawcross—yet the scoundrel has disappeared, leaving only a confusing riddle about long-forgotten memories in his wake.

So what’s a lady to do when she can’t hunt down her traitorous lover? She concentrates on a royal assignment instead. Queen Charlotte has tasked Petra with attending an event at the Asylum for Female Orphans and making inquiries surrounding the death of the orphanage’s matron. What’s more, there may be a link between the matron’s death and a group of radicals with ties to the aristocracy, as evidenced by an intercepted letter. Then, Petra overhears a nefarious conversation with two other men about a plot to topple the monarchy, set to take place during three days of celebrations currently gripping London. As the clock counts down and London’s streets teem with revelers, Petra’s nerves are fraying as her past and present collide. Yet while all’s fair in love and war, she can never surrender, especially when more orphaned girls may be in trouble. And to save their lives, the monarchy itself, and even her own heart, Lady Petra must face her fears with the strength of an army of soldiers and fight with the heart of a queen.

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My Review: Heavy hitters, those comps. Aim high, editors and marketers, we can all use some top-flight relief from reality.

If you, like me, haven't read book one (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Lord), I think you'll be okay starting here. Lady Petra is a solid character whose relationship to the world she inhabits is established; none of the frequent, and to me off-putting, Regency trope of "marriage or bust" that all the Bridgerton books reinforce so very fully. It's been a long time since the best Regency writer of all time, Georgette Heyer, poured her champagne prose into the flutes that served my readerly soul. Author Connally does not sit that high in my writers' tier list. To be fair, there are almost no other writers that high in my estimation, in genre or out. This unpleasant trope is present in Heyer's writing but is borne up from the yeasty sludge of my twenty-first centurion's disapproval by the prose it's crafted in.

The comparison to Dame Agatha is apt. The puzzle to be solved here had faint echoes of Death in the Clouds, one of her strange 1930s Poirots. If you've read it, you know what the thrust of this book will be. The preservation and/or restoration of Ma'at is the matter of all mysteries, so the ultimate resolution of the story is a foregone conclusion. Which mystery requiring Lady Petra's attention, personal or "professional," will be the one that knits a rent in the social fabric?

The accustomed repurposing of class-based access and modern storytelling's need for a female character to have agency unthinkable in the time period of the story is done deftly here. In part this is due to Lady Petra's age and status as a not-quite widow, but still suitably linked to a male authority figure that it needn't be discussed or thought about...a dead-in-the-war fiancé is a useful device in this world. Her current love interest can be elided from public suspicion because he knew her in childhood, so their connection can be acceptably explained away without the need to resort to scandal. As he is both absent in flesh and central in fact to the submystery in the book, this is a fact much traded on.

Any book set in historical times has a hurdle to leap in the way it handles the realities of its time period versus the narrative needs of a twenty-first century novel. Lady Petra lusts after Duncan, who's hunkiness is permaybehaps over-established, but in private, as would be the case for women of the era who are not Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Petra's freedom to act due to her distant connection to Queen Charlotte feels a bit overly modern but needs must when the plot-devils drive.

They drive hard in here, with a lot of characters doing a lot of things they oughtn't to do. The ideas of the story are complex, possibly convoluted, and center on the way the world is changing due to the recently-completed Napoleonic wars that have organized English society for decades. At war's end, there is little appetite for going back to the way things were for anyone disadvantaged in that earlier day. The cork's out of the bottle. Now how does society change?

Lady Petra and her fellows are figuring it out. There is a lot of upheaval to come, as history tells us, but this book is set when the shapes of the upheavers are still shadowy. The change that is inevitable in any highly unequal society is as yet unformed but its energy is very much present in every detail Lady Petra uncovers on the Queen's errand. It was fun piecing together the next few years from what happens in the story's present...a big reason I enjoy the historical-mystery genrw when it's well done. Plus: doggos!

I needed this kind of escape now. If you're in need of a series that makes story-sense, and is in hailing distance of historical sense, here's you a choice worthy of your time and treasure.