Read two
Georgette Heyer novels that were former freebies to see if I wanted to splurge on the 109th anniversary sale re-publisher Sourcebooks was holding on her books for $1.99 or less each.
1)
Footsteps in the Dark was one of those retro English countryside manor mysteries. Not bad, but not as good as I'd been hoping, given Heyer's reputation for her historical romances. A bit slow to start and drags out somewhat with a rather rapid wrap-up and obvious character revelations, I felt.
Mind you, clearly my palate has been spoiled by more modern retro English countryside manor mysteries because I kept waiting for the corpses to start piling towards the ceiling with every succeeding chapter like they usually do and the overall low body count kind of defied expectation.
2)
Cotillion, a Regency romance, was much better, although I think there was a lot of overlapping plot elements from another of her novels,
Friday's Child, I think it was, which I originally heard as a BBC radio play.
The entire initially awkward girl successfully brought into Society and pretending to have a relationship with the person you don't want in order to spite the one you do and the dénouement thereof sort of thing. And they both had feather-brained but good intentioned fashionable titled young men named "Freddy" in them, IIRC.
Lots of pleasantly silly fun, with the superficiality of the upper class lifestyle and conventions spoofed and the people having to rescue other people from their amateur plotting while having to be rescued from their own amateur plots.
Though I liked
Cotillion more, I eventually went and bought just Heyer's mysteries and historicals (and the reading companion for the Regencies, which I clearly needed because once the slang got underway, I think I understood maybe 3 words out of 5), because a quick check of the library shelf showed that they had mainly her romances anyway and the mysteries would be a lot harder to track down.
Plus, apparently Heyer's writing occasionally had the sort of
unpleasant classism/anti-semitism/xenophobic stereotyping issues that one might expect from someone raised in an insulated "good breeding" environment in the sunset of the snobbishly colonialist devil foreigner-suspecting British Empire.
There's a limit to how much I'm willing to pay out of my own pocket to read that, so best if I try a few more to see how bad it gets before I commit to buying should Sourcebooks do the sale again next year for Heyer's 110th anniversary.