Cousin Kate - Book 5

Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer is one of the few Heyer novels I hadn't read yet.  People seemed to have mixed feelings about it and I can see why.

Kate is a penniless young lady, vivacious and pretty.  She grew up following her father's regiment on the Peninsula (during Napoleon's war in Spain).  Her parents' marriage was not approved of by their families, but they loved each other, though neither seemed to have a lot of common sense.  When Kate is left a penniless orphan after her father's death, she winds up hiring herself out as a governess.  But she's too pretty for that job and eventually has to leave due to unpleasant offers of marriage.  She must depend on her old nurse, who is brimming with character and good sense.  The nurse has married and is now Mrs. Nidd and she helps run a carrier service with her husband and father in law.  With Kate really not knowing which way to turn, her nurse writes a letter to a long alienated half sister of Kate's father.  In response the aunt turns up suddenly and is all generosity and kindness and sweeps Kate back to her estate at Staplewood. 

At first Kate is overwhelmed with her aunt's generosity but soon things start to feel rather creepy and claustrophobic.  Her aunt's son, Torquil, is very odd.  Aunt Minerva's control over every one at Staplewood, her sickly, elderly husband, their resident doctor, the staff, all seems to be ways of hiding something dreadful.

The first half of the novel really builds the characters and the tension, so that the reader is starting to set on edge in true Gothic horror fashion.  But then the pacing of the story changed and Heyer spends page after page in expository conversations that just repeat the same things over and over again.  After a while, I was saying to myself, okay I've got it already!  So by the time the awful climax happens, it felt rather ho hum because I could see it from a million miles away.

It isn't a terrible book at all, but it isn't of the same caliber as many of Heyer's other books.

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