BERTIE AND THE SEVEN BODIES (Peter Lovesey)

Lovesey's main character, Bertie, aka Albert, Prince of Wales and King Edward VII, is as egotistical and entitled as you might expect the heir to the British throne to be.  He is also disarmingly clueless when it comes to his own talent (or lack thereof) as a detective  After Bertie and Princess Alexandra arrive at a hunt and house party at the country home of the lovely widow Lady Amelia Hammond, guests begin expiring at an alarming rate.  Actress Queenie Chimes is the first victim, collapsing face down in a plate of pudding with a single clue, a piece of paper with the word MONDAY, tucked under her plate.  When Queenie's companion is discovered dead in a field the following day with a scrap of paper marked TUESDAY in his pocket,  Bertie begins to suspect a pattern to the deaths.  Alix points out a that the words accompanying the bodies match a children's nursery rhyme, an idea that her husband appropriates as his own .  Bertie, with his healthy libido and over-inflated sense of his own brilliance, is a hilarious sleuth.  The period details of the hunt, the elaborate meals, and the morals of Edwardian society, including musical bedrooms, all combine into a delightful little mystery.  Reading more is definitely in MY future!