A Mystery Fit for a Queen

 by Theresa Gauthier

The Windsor Knot by S.J. Barrett

    I love a good mystery, and when the investigator is someone you wouldn’t expect, it’s even better. This book ticked a lot of boxes. I’ve long loved England—an early fascination with Princess Diana, The Beatles, Doctor Who, and other British shows (Are You Being Served?, As Time Goes By, Fawlty Towers, Monty Python)—all of this helped me zero in on this book the moment I saw it.

The Windsor Knot by S.J. Bennett sat on the top shelf at my local Barnes & Noble looking pretty and decidedly, British-ly royal. I plucked it off the shelf to take a look at it and knew it was a series I’d have to read.

It’s a solid mystery with engaging characters, with the most fascinating point being that Queen Elizabeth II, disturbed at the fact that a murder has occurred at Windsor Castle and that the official investigator, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ravi Singh, is rushing headlong down the wrong path and jumping to conclusions that she finds less than believable.

Barrett’s detective, being an eighty-nine-year-old Royal, of course can’t run around London doing her own legwork, so she engages someone else. Decidedly younger, fitter, able to walk down a street without drawing attention to herself, Rozie Oshodi, one of the queen’s assistants, steps into the role. Rozie is a Nigerian Londoner who served in Afghanistan as a captain in the British Army. Putting aside her surprise at what she’s being asked to do for queen and country, she dives into the mystery doing what the queen requests and trusting that the longest reigning British monarch knows exactly what she’s doing.

Which, of course, she does. 

The mystery is more intricate than at first it seems. A murder taking place in Windsor Castle is unlikely, and the murderer has tried to disguise this one as an accidental death. Too many things just don’t add up for the Queen to buy that line of reasoning. The victim was a guest of the castle at what’s referred to as a “dine and sleep” where people are invited not only to dinner and an evening of entertainment but also to stay the night—a sort of Royal Sleepover sans the teenagers staying up all night braiding each other’s hair. 

With so many guests, some of whom the queen is less than well-acquainted, she has to determine who might have had a motive to kill the victim, a Russian pianist named Maksim Brodsky.

Rozie, who hasn’t had her job long, is surprised to learn that this isn’t the first time the queen has become involved in just this sort of situation. The previous assistant had told her to contact her if ever anything happened—and that she’d know it when it did—Rozie remembers this and contacts her predecessor for a bit of information. Accepting the way her duties have changed from what she’d thought they were, Rozie can’t help but try to piece a few things together herself, though she’s not as quick to work things out as Queen Elizabeth.

Singh believes the Russians are behind it all. Pursuing that angle, though the queen has a hard time believing it, he’s not exploring other options. The clues pile up until it’s obvious, at least to Queen Elizabeth, that the police are just approaching this from the wrong angle. When they seem intent on pinning the crime on a member of her household, she refuses to let that be the end of it.

Queen Elizabeth is bright and has a mind that connects the things she sees. Plus she has something the Singh doesn’t. She has an understanding of the people who work for her. Knowing she can’t simply tell Singh that he’s wrong, she has to walk a fine line between pursuing her own line of inquiry and leading Singh to draw the same conclusions she’s drawn. As the first book in the series, The Windsor Knot does just what it’s supposed to do. By the time I’d finished reading it, I could imagine more mysteries requiring royal attention.