Dining with the Rich and Royal is a marvelous journey into the gastronomic peccadilloes of the great, the good, and the not-so-good. When the world is at your feet, what is on your table? Dining with the Rich and Royal serves up the glamour of the jet set on a plate, from the silver spoon to the last Kleenex wipe. We follow the food adventures of Hilton, Hefner, and Howard Hughes; the great transatlantic dynasties: Onassis, the Vanderbilts, the Astors and the Rothschilds.Royals watchers and history twitchers will find out the effect of too many fairy feasts on Ludwig of Bavaria; how Hirohito and Ibn Saud tasted East-Meets-West diplomacy. Would you try the cake that killed Rasputin or suck on a suicide sweet with Antony and Cleo? Was it sex or raspberry soufflé that won Mrs. Simpson a kings heart? Its all here: a succession of abdications, executions, revolutions, coronations, tales of toothache and posh picnics spiced with the odd military coup or two. Mind your manners now.

Fiona Ross, like most of us, leads a double existence: in her normal life as a writer of fiction in Bishops Stortford, U.K., Fiona keeps company with two bossy chickens and her dog, Parsnip. She spends a lot of time fishing chickens out of her bathtub and Parsnip out of the chicken run. In between, she stares into space a lot looking for inspiration for her stories. Meanwhile, her glamorous and exciting double works as a gastro-detective whose headquarters are the famous Bodleian Library in Oxford; she spends her time there pondering which sandwich filling she would prefer for lunch when she is not hot on the trail of a famous gastronome. TheDining with Destinyseries is the result of just such weighty thoughts oh, and a short-term memory problem which means that Fiona cannever recall anything important like the date of a war or how to hoover, but canalways be counted upon to remember how much jam Marx liked on his tarts. Time will tell which is the more important.