November/December is always a stressful time for any author who’s had a book come out in the preceding year. Everywhere you look, you see books of the year lists, in which your book inevitably doesn’t feature.
So it was a truly unexpected surprise to discover that Death of a Princess has been picked by not one but two authors making their best of 2024 selections for Aspects of History. My thanks to Fiona Forsyth and Peter Tonkin. As they are both historical novelists whose work I admire enormously, it really means a lot to me.
Fiona had this to say:
The final (?) in the Shadows of Empire trilogy brings a tired and worn-out Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky to a spa town where a suspicious death and a revolutionary group are going to create some rather nasty mayhem. I do hope this isn’t the last of Virginsky because I know nothing about Russian history and thoroughly enjoy being immersed in what is to me an alien world. This is the mark of the good historical novel! I have to mention the cracking murders in Roger’s books too, gruesome without overwhelming the reader in ick.
Here’s Peter’s review:
R N Morris’s latest novel is one of a series set in pre-revolutionary Russia. Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky, an Investigating Magistrate, becomes involved in the mysterious death of an elderly princess at a sanatorium which he is attending for treatment of a nervous breakdown. His grip on reality is questionable, the circumstances strange and dangerous – the result, an utterly gripping and occasionally breath-taking thriller.
In other news, the three stories that make up my Empire of Shadows series, Law of Blood, A Crimson Child and Death of a Princess, have now been issued as an ebook boxset, available on Amazon for £4.99 or for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. You can get it here.