Hapsburg Emperor Franz Josef I tasks Beatrix von Falklenburg with probing the "murder/suicide" in 1889 at Crown Prince Rudolf's hunting lodge at Mayerling. Did Rudolf murder Baroness Marie Vetsera and shoot himself? And might there remain something that would reveal "the dreaded secret" that could topple the Hapsburg dynasty, as rumor had long hinted? Something that has survived to 1905? But before Trixie is handed her assignment, a terrible murder occurs on a snowy Prague funicular railway. The only clue to the identity of the decapitated corpse is a tiny slip of paper in his waistcoat pocket --- a piece of paper with Trixie's telephone number on it.

THE COUNTESS OF PRAGUE is the exciting introduction to Beatrice von Falklenburg, known to her intimates as Trixie, who will lead us from Prague through Europe and occasionally beyond on a 10-book set of investigations that begins in 1904 and finishes in 1914. The assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo that summer effectively ended the Old Europe into which she was born to a noble Czech father and an English mother. Through the lens of Trixie, whose own journey from pampered aristocrat (albeit in a polite and impoverished marriage) to a degree of emancipation has an exciting yet humorous and sympathetic dynamic, we witness stirring events and societal shifts.