The Windsor Knot was an interesting set-up of a mystery, somewhat akin to an Agatha Christie. The switch is that the detective is the Queen of England. As a queen and a nonagenarian, she has limitations on what she can do, both in terms of protocol and her advanced age, so she delegates specific investigations to her underlings, especially her Assistant Private Secretary, Rozie Oshodi, a British Nigerian and recent officer in the Royal Horse Artillery. The queen’s input, via whispers into the ears of the actual MI6 investigators, leads them to pursue certain lines of thought related to the crime in question (a young Russian man is killed in his guest rooms in Windsor Palace). The list of suspects is enormous including thousands of employees of Windsor Palace, the guests who were present the night the Russian was killed, the Russian mafia, plus the Russian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern governments.
I enjoyed the character of Rozie and appreciated that she was a POC, yet that was not the primary aspect of her character. The views of the inner workings of Windsor Palace seemed quite rich and appropriate and adds a definite flare to the read. The voice of the queen seemed spot-on, with a bit of a “pip, pip, one must carry on”, “chin up”, and “stay calm and solve the mystery.” Overall I found it a tad slow, though not enough that I quit reading.
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