SKELETON-IN-WAITING - Hardcover

Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.
 
The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: The Glass-Sided Ants Nest (1968) and The Old English Peepshow (1969). Dickinson was shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice.
 
Dickinson served as chairman of the Society of Authors and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature. Peter Dickinson died on December 16, 2015, at the age of eighty-eight.
 
 

The sequel to Dickinson's King and Joker brings readers back into the lives of his fictional but convincing British royal family during a crucial period: October 1987 through September 1988. The focus is on Princess Louise, her husband Piers Chandler and their infant son David. Subtly, the author hints at danger when the princess meets Mrs. Walsh, a woman claiming to be a Romanov who escaped during the Russian Revolution. At Walsh's apartment, Louise and baby David are trapped by kidnappers, and she comports herself admirably until rescue comes. But the mysterious Mrs. Walsh, and another Russian on the scene, are killed, leaving the princess determined to learn the secrets that died with them. Thus Louise accompanies Piers to Tashkent and finds out what Walsh had strived to conceal about her past. A superb stylist, the author evokes empathy for the ruling family, especially HRH and her commoner spouse--righteous, regal, and human as any real-life exponent of the arduous royal life.
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