New Royal Baby Week!

Another new Georgie will be born this week. Not at Kensington Palace but at a bookstore near you.

Heirs and Graces, my 7th Royal Spyness mystery, will be coming out this Tuesday, August 6th. In hardcover, as an e-book, and in audio with Audible and the fabulous Katherine Kellgren reading it.

I'll be making appearances in the San Francisco Bay Area, in greater LA and in Scottsdale. Hope to see you at one of them. For details check out appearances on my website and on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/rhysbowenauthor)

And to whet your appetite here is an early review:

Heirs and Graces is the seventh installment in Rhys Bowen’s utterly fabulous Royal Spyness Mystery series. It’s Agatha Christie meets P.G. Wodehouse with a dash of Downton Abbey thrown in for good measure, and it’s every bit as extraordinary as its predecessors. This book grabs you with the very first sentence and then staunchly refuses to let go. The prose is graceful yet spirited. The narrative drive is strong. The mystery is clever, complex, and is destined to keep you guessing thanks to its wealth of clever clues and viable suspects. And Bowen does a spectacular job transporting readers to 1930s Britain; her descriptions of manor-house life are vivid, and her writing has a remarkable sense of time and place.
Bowen’s character work is among the best in the genre. The perfect blend of proper and impertinent, Georgie is a marvelous heroine for whom you can’t help but root. Fiancé and partner-in-crime Darcy is not only a great love interest, but a compelling character in his own right. Georgie’s flighty actress mother, man-eating best friend, and utterly incompetent maid provide regular doses of comic relief.  And murder victim Cedric is so callous and self-absorbed, you’ll be rooting for his death from the moment you make his acquaintance.
If you’re a fan of mysteries, love historical fiction, or just like good books, give Heirs and Graces by Rhys Bowen a try; I’ve yet to read a book of Bowen’s that I didn’t completely and totally adore, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what Georgie gets up to next.
Reviewed by Kat

Royal Baby--Great Expectations

At this moment I'm doing what the rest of the civilized world is doing--holding my breath and waiting for the arrival of the royal baby. At this point the Duchess of Cambridge has been in labor for about ten hours. Of course we don't know whether she went into hospital at the start of real labor with contractions every few minutes, or if she went in at the first twinge. In which case it could be days.

I'm a little perplexed that all the media still calls her Kate Middleton. I think that is disrespectful and just wrong. Her married name is Kate, Duchess of Cambridge. You wouldn't call other women by their single name after they married, would you?

And everybody has been speculating on the name, sex, weight etc etc. I ran a poll on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/rhysbowenauthor) and I'm going to give an ARC of my upcoming Royal Spyness book, HEIRS AND GRACES to anyone who gets the name completely right. My own prediction is Victoria Mary Diana Elizabeth, OR George Arthur Phillip.

I am inclined to think it will be a girl. And I don't go along with Alexandra, which is the name that most Brits are betting on. Nor do I think it will be Madison, Reagan, Riley or Kylie. or Carol, Kate's mum's name.

So any predictions on when it will arrive? How much it will weigh?