What a lot of rubbish this is! Everyone in here is vain, touchy, violent, and stupid. Well, a few people are not stupid, but most of them only occasionally exhibit intelligence, and the rest are perfect dunces. I don't know why I'm supposed to be interested in them, but I'm not - they're unpleasant, and if the whole bunch had died in a fire, this overlong novel would be much shorter and much more engaging.

I hold one exception to the above. I slogged my way through 500 pages of this bilge before a compelling character came along, but when she did I was riveted. The Lady DeWinter is the only reason this book isn't getting a single star from me. She's awful, but she's interesting, and I was really hoping she'd survive, on the grounds that if there were a sequel she might succeed in knocking off some of these tossers after all. Her manipulative seduction of Felton is a masterclass of villainous characterisation, and having seen from it that Dumas can, indeed, produce characters I give a damn about, I'm all the more annoyed that he hadn't done so beforehand.