Non-fiction "true crime" legal procedural set in the early 1920s, about a Euro-trash French former demi-monde (Marguerite Alibert) who shot and killed her Egyptian playboy husband ("Prince" Ali Kamel Fahmy) late one night in a hallway of the Savoy Hotel in London. She got away scot-free, thanks in equal parts to the histrionics of her old-school defense attorney, the casual racism of the English jury, and the machinations of several upper class British courtiers who made sure that the prosecution conducted the case with one hand tied behind its back.

Turns out that Marguerite had been one of the "pols" (high-class prostitutes) responsible for initiating the playboy Edward Prince of Wales into the "joys of intimacy" during World War I - and moreover she claimed possession of a cache of highly embarrassing, highly incriminating "billet-doux." It is the author's contention - largely substantiated though mostly through circumstantial evidence - that Marguerite leveraged her own acquittal - in exchange for giving up the correspondence, her background as a sex-worker would be kept out of the trial, and she would keep her mouth shut about her previous liaison with the Prince of Wales.

This was fascinating to me: at his summation, Marguerite's defense attorney insinuated that Marguerite's killing of her husband was justified by the "foreign" bedroom practices [anal sex] that he forced upon her: "She made one mistake, the greatest mistake any woman can make: a woman of the West married to an Oriental. . ."

Really, it reads like a Maigret novel. Everyone is on the make, no one is sympathetic.

Yeah, the book is not well-written. What were you expecting? The book is well-researched on the whole, although it is frustrating that there is no index, and the footnotes are full of peculiarities and errors. ( )