Parents' Guide to The Queen's Spade

As THE QUEEN'S SPADE begins, Sally Forbes Bonetta tells readers she's "no heroine" and gives them "permission to hate me" after they've read her story. That story begins with a murder, the first act of vengeance against a list of men Sally rightly feels are abusers and murderers. Born a princess in Nigeria, Sally was captured at age 7 by soldiers from the kingdom of Dahomey after the murder of her parents. She was rescued by Captain George Forbes, an English Naval officer who brings her back to England as a gift for Queen Victoria, who makes Sally her goddaughter. On the voyage to England, she sees the captain throw her friend Ade overboard, leaving him to drown simply because he isn't a "handsome Negro." Her first night in London, she is forced to dance naked in front of Forbes and a group of men. Now 18, Sally vows vengeance against them, and she finds a willing partner in Rui, a Chinese gangster from the East End of London. To almost everyone, Sally has become a smart, beautiful, and respectable young woman. She lives with the Schoens, a couple the Queen has deemed suitable guardians; attends parties at palaces; and mingles with the richest and noblest men and women in England. But Sally knows she'll always be an outsider—one of the Queen's "social experiments" to see if people like Sally can be "civilized." When the Queen, who Sally thinks is now onto what she's been doing, decrees that she's chosen a husband for her, Sally is furious. While marriage to James Davies, a wealthy African businessman, will mean a return to the home she loves, she still has vengeance to exact ... and the Queen has now been added to that list. There's blackmail, a poisoning, and an assassination attempt; scandalous pictures of the Queen; and a seance at at Windsor Castle before a final violent meeting with the Queen at Balmoral Castle.