I was always a fan of Princess Diana. I took my first bar exam in Roanoke, Virginia, on the day she married Prince Charles. I got up while it was still dark to watch the wedding and then went to the Civic Center where I spent the rest of the day taking the bar.
I felt a bond with Diana because we both loved motherhood, and we were both disappointed in our marriages. After she died, I read a lot about the tragedy in the Place d’Alma tunnel. I do criminal law appeals, so I read about crimes and crime scenes on a daily basis, and I felt the whole story of Diana’s death hadn’t been told.
Then one day I read that Diana had received a phone call in January 1997 telling her she was going to be assassinated. She made a video tape naming the person on the call and gave it to a trusted friend to take to America. Her tape has never been found. She died eight months later, on August 31, 1997.
After I read this bit of history, the writer in me took over and began to wonder what if Diana had a close personal friend whom the British government could not touch and who made it his personal mission to find her tape and make it public. And what if her great friend was Nicholas Carey, a duke with a title dating back to Henry VIII’s time and one of the world’s most eligible bachelors? And what if he had tragically lost his wife, Deborah, the love of his life, who was also Diana’s great school friend at West Heath? And what if the person who had the tape was Taylor Collins, a beautiful Wall Street attorney, and the one person in the world who didn’t see Nicholas as Prince Charming? But what if her indifference toward Nicholas and the Careys changed when she read the diary of Thomas Carey, the knight at Henry’s court, whose great love story, against all the odds, founded the family that has lasted for five hundred years, a family that Nicholas now wants to destroy because he lost his wife? And what if Nicholas has a mysterious ward whose existence could thwart his plan to make the Carey family extinct? And what if Nicholas is accused of murder, and Taylor is the only person who can save him? And what if someone is trying to kill Taylor because she has Diana’s tape? In short, I wondered, who killed the Princess of Wales.
In January 1997, Princess Diana received a phone call telling her she would be assassinated. She recorded the information on a secret video tape, naming her killer and gave it to a trusted friend in America for safekeeping. It has never been found.
Diana's close friend, Nicholas Carey, the 18th Duke of Burnham and second richest man in England, has vowed to find the tape and expose her killer. After years of searching, he discovers Diana gave the tape to British socialite Mari Cuniff, who died in New York under mysterious circumstances. He believes Wall Street attorney Taylor Collins, the executor of Mari's estate, has possession of it. He lures Taylor to England by promising to sell his ancestral home in Kent, Burnham Abbey, to one of her clients, a boarding school for American girls. Nicholas has dated actresses and models since the death of his wife, ten years earlier, and has no interest in falling in love again. But he is immediately and unexpectedly overwhelmed with feelings for Taylor at their first meeting.
Taylor, unaware that Diana's tape is in her long-time friend and client's estate and nursing her hurt over her broken engagement to a fellow attorney in her firm, brands Nicholas supremely spoiled and selfish. She is in a hurry to finish the sale of the Abbey and return to New York. But while working in the Abbey's library, Taylor uncovers the diary of Thomas Carey, a knight at the court of Henry VIII and the first Duke of Burnham.
As she reads Thomas' agonizing struggle to save the love of his life and the mother of his child from being forced to become Henry's mistress, she begins to see Nicholas in a new light as he battles to save his sixteen-year-old ward Lucy, who is desperately unhappy and addicted to cocaine. But just as Taylor's feelings for Nicholas become clear and at the moment she realizes she is in possession of Diana's voice from the grave, she learns that Nicholas may be Lucy's father and responsible for his wife's death at the Abbey at the time of Lucy's birth. When Nicholas is arrested for Lucy's murder and taken to Wandsworth Prison, Taylor sets out to learn the truth about Nicholas, his late wife, and the death of the Princess of Wales.
Dance for A Dead Princess is a the story of two great loves that created and preserved a family that has lasted for five hundred years.
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Genre – Contemporary Romance,Mystery
Rating – G
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Connect with Deborah Hawkins on Facebook
Website http://deborahlhawkins.com/
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