Princess of the Savoy

For glitz, drama, and mystery, there’s no better setting than a fancy hotel, and it doesn’t come fancier than London’s Savoy. It’s the swinging ‘60s in the late Emery’s (Death at the Savoy, Scandal at the Savoy) last book, her third starring a quiet champion of the hotel’s steely reputation, press officer Priscilla Tempest. (Emery was herself a press and public relations officer at the hotel.) The young Canadian is used to the casual sexism that is women’s lot in the era, but Europe’s classism is harder for her to take, and when two dueling cousins, Italian princes, arrive as guests, her patience is sorely tested. One of the princes fears he will be the subject of a story by “that blighter Percy Hoskins at the Evening Standard,” and stopping the muckraking story at the behest of her boss leads Priscilla into the lairs of London’s underworld gangsters and some decidedly upper-class ones, with England’s very way of life on the line. A fast-moving story whose initial frothy air is a clever mask on the serious stakes soon underway. Readers will want to go back to the first two books in the series, and after that can try Nita Prose’s hotel-set Maid series.