After reading Royal Flush I was really ambivalent about reading more in this series. However, I was swayed by the cover art and the book blurb into forgetting my previous reservations. I regretted that decision. It's not that these books are unreadable, it's just that they are all the same. In fact Bowen had previously used the same manner of death in A Royal Pain! As a mystery it was totally predicable.

Also, I found the repeated use of pejorative terms toward gay men and the repeatedly negative characterization of Prince Sigfried, a gay character, disturbing. While I realize that these terms might have been more widely used in the 1930s than today, these aspects are totally unnecessary to the plot. It was the superfluousness of it that made me feel like it was the result of prejudice rather than historically accurate writing.