King and Joker Author:Peter Dickinson The trouble in the Palace began with a practical joker. The jokes, including a tasteless incident in the King's private loo, seemed harmless at first. Then they turned nasty, rattling skeletons in the royal closet and revealing that the joker knew the most carefully kept secrets of Britain's unflappable royal family. And the dead body left in th... more »e throne room was no joke at all. It was homicide -- and only someone on the Palace staff or a family member could have done it. HRH King Victor II himself had his suspicions, including a notion that the butler did it. But it would take the snooping of precocious thirteen-year-old Princess Louise to find a dark, dusty trail of royal lies and desires, to discover what an elderly nanny had never told, and to risk spilling her blue blood upstairs, downstairs, and in my Lady's chamber while a murderer was still at large ... and planning to kill again.« less