Publication: 13th April 2023 – Usborne
Totally addictive and packed full of glamour, scandal and romance, Royal Blood is The Princess Diaries with murder, for fans of One Of Us Is Lying, Red, White And Royal Blue and The King Is Dead.
Kicked out of her American boarding school, Evan is sent to live with her estranged father, the King of England. Her existence as his illegitimate daughter is top secret – until someone leaks it to the press. Suddenly she’s the focus of a thousand lurid headlines, plus the hatred of her stepmother the Queen and half-sister Princess Maisie.
Then the royal scandal intensifies… After Evan is seen disappearing with a journalist’s son at a party, he is found dead and she becomes the primary suspect in a murder investigation. Did “the Killer Princess” really do it? It seems that only the Queen’s gorgeous nephew Kit will help Evan clear her name. But can she really trust anyone at the palace?
I adored Royal Blood. I read it one day, staying up late to finish it. There are secrets, a murder mystery with a few twists, a bit of romance, but also more serious themes, like sexual assault and mental health that made for an engaging and thrilling read.
In the last seven years, Evangeline “Evan” Bright has been expelled from several boarding schools. After inadvertently causing a fire in the last one, she is forced to spend the summer in London with her father who is none other than the King of England, but that’s the last place Evan wants to be. Born from an affair eighteen years earlier, very few people know of her illegitimacy and she’s never met her father. Until now. Their first meeting is not the warmest and things are not better with the Queen and her stepsister Mary, who despise her very existence. As she adapts to life in the palace, she finds a few friends in the King’s secretary Jenkins and his partner Louis, in the determined assistant Tibby, and in the charming nephew of the Queen, Kit. And Evan needs friends when the truth about her birth is revealed by the press and she becomes the focus of vicious comments and lies.
Also, after a party, a body is discovered and Evan was the last person to see the victim alive, so she needs to find out the truth and fix her reputation, leading her to uncover other secrets inside the palace.
I loved the character of Evan. Bold, smart, and fiery, she grew up with her grandmother because her mother suffered from mental problems. After her grandmother’s death, she learned the truth about her birth and she spent the following years in different boarding schools where she was never able to make friends because of the secrets she had to keep. Her relationship with her father is as central to the story as the murder mystery and I loved how it developed.
Royal Blood is gripping, intriguing, and very well-written and it has a terrific ending that makes me really look forward to the sequel.
A huge thank you to Usborne and NetGalley for providing me with a proof of the novel.
Aimée Carter is a graduate of the University of Michigan and is the internationally-bestselling award-winning author of over a dozen books.
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