A Flaw in the Blood » (Reprint)

Stephanie Barron is the author of nine bestselling Jane Austen mysteries. She lives near Denver, Colorado, where she is at work on her next novel of historical suspense, The White Garden.

The acclaimed author of the bestselling Jane Austen mysteries brings rich historical immediacy to an enthralling new suspense novel centered around Queen Victoria’s troubled court…and a secret so dangerous, it could topple thrones.

Windsor Castle, 1861. Prince Albert, the Queen’s Consort, lies dying, and Victoria summons Patrick Fitzgerald, the clever, embittered Irish barrister who helped defend Her Majesty from a would-be assassin twenty years earlier. Within hours, Fitzgerald’s beautiful ward is nearly murdered, his chambers are ransacked, and another girl lies dead. Could an unknown force at Windsor want Fitzgerald silenced? And why? The answers are entangled in an electrifying tale of intrigue, seduction, and betrayal, partially narrated by Europe’s most powerful monarch.

As fascinating as the Queen herself, seamlessly blending history and suspense, A Flaw in the Blood is an elegant thriller that is utterly convincing—and utterly surprising—to its very end.

Publishers Weekly

After a slow start, all the narrative strands, among them the voice of Queen Victoria, begin to work together in this engaging historical from Barron (Jane and the Stillroom Maidand eight other Jane Austen mysteries). Against a backdrop of national mourning for Prince Albert in 1861, an evil (complete with eye patch) German count, Wolfgang von Stühlen, tracks Irish barrister Patrick Fitzgerald, who 20 years earlier defended a would-be assassin of the queen, and Fitzgerald's beautiful ward, Georgiana "Georgie" Armistead, who, unusually for a woman of the period, is trained as a doctor. Georgie's specialized medical knowledge comes into play as the late prince consort's concerns and his widow's fears drive the fleeing pair to France, to visit Victoria's youngest son, the sickly Prince Leopold, and on to Bavaria, the original home of the interrelated family of Victoria and Albert. (An opening genealogical chart shows that the queen and her consort were cousins.) The history of the royal line is diverting, and the royal gossip is even more so. (Mar.)