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John Staple finds a young scared boy in charge of a toll-gate in fen country and stops to help and find out what happened to his father the toll keeper. John was a captain of dragoons and is a very large man. The Squire's granddaughter passes on her way to church and it is love at first sight for both. A mystery, deaths, bow street runner, missing bullion. ( )

Another amusing and diverting Heyer tale of confusion and skullduggery and tollkeeping. I enjoyed it immensely. ( )

My first Heyer, who is someone I keep seeing good things written about. My first reaction was that she reminded me of Phyllis Whitney's very light romances that I read when I was 13-14 and loved. The thing is, I am not thirteen any longer and I like my romance with a bit more bite. Heyer has a delightful sense of humor, so you can read her characters with a soft chuckle and little seriousness, which is her salvation, in this novel at least.

What I did love was the setting she chose, the historical toll-gate house and its surrounding environs. Heyer creates interesting secondary characters, playing the different classes off against one another superbly. She has a sort of lilt to her style and makes reading almost effortless. It is not hard to see how she gives a lot of pleasure to a reader who wants a vacation from the serious stuff in life.

I wanted to love her, but alas, I do not. I found the dashing Captain a little too invincible. I found the heroine strangely malleable for someone who was supposed to be a spitfire, and I found the plot trite and uneventful. I did not like the idea that a man who had avoided marriage for so long would fall so completely for a woman with one single look. (I am not giving anything away, since this happens at the exact moment that the two of them meet--very early in the book). I hope the ladies of the Heyer Group, and particularly my friend Andrea, will forgive me this, since there are always those who love what we love and also those who do not. I think I have re-discovered that I am a tragedian and like high drama far more than comedy or romance.
( )

Well, that was a fun, funny, and tedious read. I was both entertained and exasperated, and not a little impatient, the entire time I read it. I’m not quite sure how that works; it’s a first for me.

The book starts off at a house party to celebrate the 6th Earl of Saltash’s engagement. Other than the fact that Captain Staple is at the party, it and all the details and characters involved have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book and never again come into play. So the first chapter and half of the second are entirely irrelevant. It’s only once Captain Staple leaves the house party that the story really begins.

Staple gets a late start, and gets caught in a storm that leaves him lost in the moors, until he finds himself at a toll-gate, late at night, being run by a terrified 10 year old boy. Looking for a place to shelter, Staple stops, and learns that the boy’s father, the real toll-keeper, was only supposed to be gone an hour but never came back. The next morning, Staple experiences love at first sight when he lays eyes on a woman, the squire’s daughter, passing through the gate on her way to church. Needing an excuse to stay, Staple tells the boy he’ll stick around to figure out what happened to his father, intending to woo the squire’s daughter at the same time.

What unfolds is a bit of a rollicking adventure that was almost entirely ruined by Heyer’s heavy use of obscure British slang and vernacular.

“Prigged his tattler, too, but I sold that. I’m a great one for a pinch o’ merry-go-up, and this little box just happened to take my fancy, and I’ve kept it. I daresay I’d get a double finnup for it, too,” he added.”
In context, I can ascertain the speaker is referencing a theft, but the entire book is written like this, which is what makes this well-plotted adventure so damn tedious. By midway through the book, I got the impression that Heyer was purposefully laying it on as thickly as possible, either to prove something to herself, or torture her editors and readers. Perhaps at the time of publication, readers wouldn’t have struggled with the senseless dialog, but I’d have appreciated a glossary – or perhaps just a great deal less verisimilitude. ( )