The first book of a series always sets the tone and the bar for the entire series, especially if it's supposed to be murder mysteries. The first book of this introduced our cast of characters with:
Georgie: main character, intrepid, daring but not foolish
Granddad: Cockney, former copper, fount of wisdom in all things practical
Belinda: Georgie's female friend, maneater, possible alcoholic, gambler, always urges Georgie to lose her virginity
Darcy O'Mara: male love interest, impoverished Irish lord's only son, always appears in the nick of time as though he's stalking Georgie, no other redeeming characteristic except that he is incredibly, jaw-droppingly good-looking
David, Prince of Wales: the Edward that gets involved with Wallis Simpson--no idea why he's referred to as Edward
The Queen: would have been a black market antiques dealer/thief in another life, always takes a slice of brown bread at tea, sighs over her tea and murmurs "a bad business, this," useless at actually doing anything
Binky: Georgie's brother, Duke of Glen Garry and Rannoch, strapped for cash, idiotic but harmless, a large, wide man
Fig: Binky's wife and Georgie's sister-in-law, extremely penny-pinching and jealous of Georgie's connections to royalty, incredibly annoying; penny-pinching constantly used as a plot device
Georgie's Need for Money to Survive: Also mainly a plot device and sometimes is more severe or less severe depending on whether Georgie really needs a new pair of shoes that she can't afford
All that was fine and dandy in the first book because Georgie was not an idiot who made idiotic decisions that caused unnecessary turmoil in her life. In this book, however, the entire setup was iffy. In order that Georgie is put into close proximity with the Princess of Bavaria, fresh out of a convent and about to be matchmade with the Prince of Wales by the Queen, Georgie needs to give her room and board.
While on paper this might have been a cute and fun idea, in execution, it failed utterly because Georgie is dirt-poor to the point that she's cleaning people's houses. She has no servants in the London house she stays in and instead of saying so to the Queen--as this sort of expectation is quite an imposition on anyone, she nods dumbly and ropes her grandfather and his love interest into "working for her." Free of charge, of course, because she's dirt-poor. None of this makes a bit of sense, because he's an elderly retired man--why would he want to give up his freedom and retirement to go into slave labor? The reason (trying to play hide and seek with the bailiffs) doesn't make that much sense.
The REAL reason is so that her grandfather can give her "clues" in the form of saying that the Princess is a shady bit. It really wasn't that great of a clue and didn't outweigh the great inconvenience of the entire plot device, which was so illogical that it made Georgie seem idiotic as a result. The best clue as to the killer didn't even come from the grandfather's endless meddling, but from Georgie's mother, who gave away that the Princess wasn't the same person she saw a year ago. That and the Princess's unforeseen confession as to her favorite mountains in her country (the one listed wasn't even in her country).
All those and the unending copy editing errors made my eyes spin. There were dropped conjunctions and mismatched tenses all over the place. If the first book had about three errors all told, this book had uncountable ones--I would number them above fifteen at least. That's just way too shoddy for a book that was nominated for so many awards, even if it only happened in the Kindle version.