Death of a Queen

“GIVE UP YOUR FOOLISH PLAN. IF NOT YOU DIE.”



When the elderly Queen Hanna discovers the anonymous threatening letter, she knows someone in her household is spying on her. The queen is secretly planning a ceremony of atonement that she hopes will secure the royal succession. Amateur sleuth Charles Venables is invited by

the queen’s son Gustav to help identify the spy quickly and discreetly before her next public appearance. But on his first night in Iconia, Queen Hanna is strangled with a museum relic known as the “Curse of the Herzvogins”. Venables knows an all-too-human hand is involved, but how was the murderer able to enter the queen’s heavily guarded chamber? And why was her body found wearing the royal ceremonial robes rather than the clothes she had retired in?



Christopher St John Sprigg was a witty and prolific writer who also published non-fiction under the pseudonym Christopher Caudwell. Death of a Queen was the fifth of seven crime novels Sprigg wrote between 1933 and his death in February 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Other books featuring sleuth Charles Venables—Crime

in Kensington, Fatality in Fleet Street and The Perfect Alibi—are also available from Moonstone Press.