Lady Georgie Pulls Out a Christmas Pudding Plum

"The Twelve Clues of Christmas" by Rhys Bowen
Reviewed by David Marshall James

The snow is covering the landscape like a great mass of Devonshire clotted cream, the dining-room table is groaning with mince pies and other festive sweets and savories, and loads of games and seasonal activities are in the offing for a Christmas house party.

This sixth Royal Spyness mystery finds its heroine, Lady Georgiana Rannoch (thirty-fifth in line to the British throne), in the Devon village of Tiddleton-under-Lovey, having answered an advertisement to add glamour and fun to said house party, organized by the local lady of the manor to raise funds for the depleted estate coffers, this being 1933, and even lords and ladies being hard-put.

Of course, Georgie is equally hard-pressed, being rather redundant in her own family, with their own budget-stretching mightily enforced by Fig, Georgie's prig of a sister-in-law. Why won't Bright Young Thing Georgie wed some rich someone and be forever off the Rannoch dole, as it were?

Also in Tiddleton-under-Lovey for the season are Georgie's Mum, an aging yet well-kept stage actress, and none-other-than Noel Coward. They've holed up in a village cottage, the better to collaborate on a play, yet Noel is lapping up all the good lines, at least in Mumsie's mind.

They have engaged Georgie's Grandad's good friend, Mrs. Huggins, as cook, and Grandad is down from London to offer his company and breathe some fresh country air.

So, it's really shaping up as a jolly holiday for Lady Georgie, until the locals start dropping like holly berries from a week-old wreath.

Still, the presence of Georgie's longtime beau (and enigmatic man of the World), Darcy O'Mara, furthers the joy in her Joyeux Noel. As it would happen, Darcy turns out to be the nephew of the lady of the manor, and he has been attempting to contact Georgie, but Fig the Prig hasn't allowed his phone messages to reach her.

Blasted cow, that Fig.

Darcy, an Irishman in line for a title, is deemed unacceptable to the penurious Fig because of his current dearth of funds.

Author Rhys Bowen's "Twelve Days of Christmas"-themed mystery glitters like a tinsel-laden tree-- fun, funny, and seeped in its period and setting like a Christmas pudding aged in brandy.

The "Royal Spyness" mysteries were conceived under a frothy, Coward-esque premise, and the series really hit its stride with the previous entry, "Naughty in Nice." The introduction of Queenie, Lady Georgie's woefully inept maid, has provided the series with a delightful lift.

The author will have to locate an extensive literary ladder in order to top this novel, which is just the sort of thing Coward himself would have written, had he turned his hand toward mystery novels.