BOOK- DANCE FOR A DEAD PRINCESS- The people Nicholas Carey has loved are all ghosts: his mother, the world-famous concert pianist; his wife, Deborah, the most beautiful woman in England; and Diana, Princess of Wales, his most trusted friend and confident. How many nights has he spent talking to Diana about his marriage, about her marriage, about his guilt over Deborah, and about the impossibility of being in love? Too many to count. He aches to tell Diana how empty his life has become without her and without Deborah, but he can do nothing to bring them back. Yet he can expose Diana’s killer. Taylor Collins, a Wall Street lawyer, has the tape Diana made naming her assassin, and he is determined to get it.
Taylor does not want to spend Christmas at Burnham Abbey overseeing the sale of the Carey’s ancestral home to her client, an American school for girls. Nicholas Carey, the Eighteenth Duke of Burnham, holder of a five-hundred-year-old title, is a spoiled selfish international financier; and Taylor would far rather be in New York, pursuing her high-powered legal career and hoping her fiancé, who left her at the alter months earlier, will return.
But night after night, Taylor hears Nicholas at the piano playing the haunting pavane for all the lost princesses in his life because his broken heart will not let him sleep. By day, she reads the tragic love story of Thomas, the First Duke, knight and liegeman to Henry VIII, who founded the Carey family but who never recovered from the loss of his beloved wife. Just as Taylor realizes Thomas’s unmeasurable capacity to love is hidden beneath Nicholas’s shallow public facade, Lucy, Nicholas’s mysterious ward, turns up dead. Taylor’s heart is stretched to its limits as she searches for the truth about Nicholas and comes face to face with Diana’s assassins. AMAZON
A flight on fancy involving Princess Diana and her murder as part of the story.
There are several different dramas going on at the same time that cause you to wonder about the Duke, Nicholas and his past life. Not only if he was guilty of harming his now dead wife, Deborah but also if he was the good guy in this present time. Of course as the reader we get to see some of what Nicholas and Taylor were thinking and feeling. Their POV's were done in a way that wasn't confusing or repetitive. There were a couple issues that were repeated because it was part of the mystery. The old diaries that Taylor found were an interesting addition and at the end of the story you end up finding they also figure into the whole story . The romance dance between Nicholas and Taylor was a good one; each one wanting to move forward but both afraid to be hurt by loving again. Nicholas wasn't the only one with a tragic history; Taylor had a lot of pain that she was hiding inside of herself. There were plenty of twists and turns to satisfy any sleuth aficionado. The story also managed to pull on the heartstrings quite often. Especially the music that Nicholas played on the piano; the dance for a dead princess. I really liked that touch. And Lucy, who was Nicholas' ward made plenty of trouble all on her own; she was one piece of work.
I was given a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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