The Time of Murder at Mayerling
The third Nicholas Segalla time-travel mystery (The Prince Lost to Time) cuts a jagged trail through the facts and rumors surrounding the death of the Hapsburg Prince Rudolph in 1899. When the bodies of the prince and his 17-year-old mistress are found at the Imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling, Austria, the first account says they were poisoned. But it's soon determined that the couple died in a suicide pact-he shot her, then himself. Getting papal approval for a church burial is a tricky business, but permission is granted on condition that Segalla, appearing here as a papal envoy, may return after the official mourning period to look more closely at the case. When he does, he finds that the Hapsburgs have closed ranks and are reluctant to help him complete his mission. Segalla, as worldly and sophisticated as they come (time-travel and immortality will certainly season a man), measures all the angles, but even he comes up with more questions than answers. Why would a prince, who was planning to return to Vienna and who had visited another of his mistresses only a week before, kill himself and a girl who forced her way into his hunting party? Why had no one at Mayerling heard the shots? Surely not just murder, but politics, too, is afoot. Outlining all the geopolitical scenarios haunting the twilight of the ancien regime forces the pseudonymous Dukthas into a slow pace that picks up just a bit too late.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.