Peccadillo at the Palace: An Annie Oakley Mystery
Second in a promising new amateur sleuth series, Peccadillo at the Palace gets off to a racing start aboard ship with a series of events tumbling over themselves for attention. ‘Little Miss Sure Shot’, Annie Oakley, teams up with her delightfully flamboyant journalist friend, Emma, to investigate the poisoning death of Queen Victoria’s envoy, who has been sent to guide Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show entourage to England. With a ‘boatload’ of suspects, the clues seem to point towards an assassination attempt upon the Queen herself.
Diverse historical political characters and events pepper this story—Gladstone, Charles Parnell, Anna Parnell, Oscar Wilde, Lily Langtry, Irish Home Rule, the Fenians, and the horrific siege of Cawnpore―to name but a few. The novel is well grounded in history, although I did puzzle over Annie and Emma’s seemingly premature knowledge of fingerprinting.
The first half of this mystery is so promising! Unfortunately, Annie began to wear on me with her cramps, dizziness and nausea. The oft-repeated mentions became tedious, and, after finishing the book I surmised that the editor could have taken it all out, with no hindrance whatsoever to the plot. Sadly, a lot of Annie’s character got drowned out because she always seemed shadowed by illness―husband, Frank, is ill in bed during almost the entire book, although I concede this is plot-related.
Other than that, this is a fast-paced murder mystery which conceals the perpetrator in the mix of clues, suspicions, characters and general goings-on, until the very end. A follow-up ‘Annie’ mystery would give readers the opportunity to better know this unpretentious and plucky heroine―one of the most fascinating women in the history of the U. S.―a woman much ahead of her time!
