Gothic romance that plays on the idea of a doppelganger - the heroine, a dead ringer for a missing heiress, takes on the role of her double in order to get her hands on the inheritance. There's a twist, which I won't go into so as not to spoil things, but on the whole it's very cleverly done. I have vague recollections of reading this as a teenager, and the twist was the only thing I actually remembered, so I was aware, when rereading this as I just did, of what that twist would be, and so paid much more attention to the construction of the book up to that point, and it's genuinely well done. Like Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it's something that plays very heavily on ambiguity and double-meaning.

So why two stars, when Ackroyd got four from me? The romances - both that of the heroine and that of her young cousin - aren't particularly convincing, but they're not actually awful either. And I quite liked the heroine, even if she was out to scam a number of people. I did get heartily sick of the frequent scattered put-downs of women, though - most of which were from the mouth of said heroine. Things like "I'll try and explain now, like a reasonable human being, which means not like a woman." I realise this was written in a different time, but Stewart had plenty of contemporaries who didn't feel the need for such repetitive contempt. I can only roll my eyes so many times before nausea occurs. More crucially, it plain makes no sense to be so un-wary of someone who you know has already tried to murder you once. For a book that witters on about how women have no logic, it certainly backs up its stupid idea (both from character and author, if not from reader) in how credibly that particular plot line plays out. Even the horses have more sense.