This was a barrel of laughs, and although the hero and heroine get themselves into a rare old muddle through sheer stupidity, and some of the characters are a bit over the top, it’s all so funny that it doesn’t really matter.

Here’s the premise: Samantha Bright has been buried in the country her whole life, and has reached the ripe old age of twenty-six without finding a husband. Part of the problem is that she’s been in love with her neighbour Lord Monteith for years, even though he treats her with negligent familiarity, calling her his country flirt – when he’s even at home, that is, which isn’t often. One day Monteith will marry, he supposes, but not yet, and until then he’s enjoying himself thoroughly, while Sam is languishing into spinsterhood. But into this stasis comes Monteith’s uncle, Lord Howard, who returns home from India with a million pounds in his pocket, determined to marry and sets his sights on Sam. Which of course serves to focus Monteith’s attention properly on her for the first time.

From here on, the plot follows a fairly predictable path. There are some side distractions, like Mrs Armstrong, the retired courtesan that Howard wants to set up as his mistress, but she’s angling for marriage, and Clifford Sutton, the low-key friend and possible suitor of Monteith’s mother, who is herself a central character, constantly manipulating everyone around her in the most outrageous fashion. But Lord Howard is the character who dominates the stage in every scene, completely upstaging the two principals, who seem drab and spiritless by comparison.

I confess to being puzzled by the titles. It’s never mentioned what Monteith’s exact rank is, but since his uncle is Lord Howard, he can only be a duke or a marquess, and since nobody your-graces him, he must be a marquess. Which is pretty high up the pecking order, but no one ever refers to it, or treats the family with the sort of deference that a marquessate would usually engender. Nothing wrong with that, it just struck me as odd. There was one historical misstep – not impossible but something that would have been frowned upon. I don’t want to be too spoilerish, so I’ll just say – marriage to deceased wife’s sister.

This is not the book to read if you want deep character development or oodles of angst, with emotion spilt all over the page. It’s written in the classic tradition of Heyer-esque Regency romps, all froth and silliness, no unseemly lusting, and the headline romance is wrapped up on the last page with the hero sweeping the heroine into his manly arms for a thorough kissing. Although to be fair, there is a sort of an epilogue here.

It’s also not the book to read if you’re a stickler for period-accuracy language, and don’t get me started on the punctuation. If this book has ever seen a proofreader, he or she should be fired immediately. Much of it reads as if it was transcribed from a printed version by optical character recognition, and then simply published. Not good enough. But it’s very funny, and I can forgive a book a great deal if it makes me laugh. The conversations between Sam and Monty, especially in the beginning, before he gets all grumpy and jealous, are hilarious. But there are just too many misunderstandings, and too many errors to give it more than four stars.

This is not the book for anyone who is a stickler for historical language or plot plausibility. It is, however, wildly funny, and although I rolled my eyes at something or other on every third page, along would come another laugh out loud moment, and so I just kept on reading. It’s outrageously silly, but it doesn’t matter a bit.

Here’s the premise (such as it is): Lizzie Bladen and her Aunt Maisie are struggling to keep their heads above water at their impoverished and heavily mortgaged family home, while Lizzie’s younger brother Jeremy is away at Oxford. Lizzie decides she’ll have to sell her dowry, a historic and valuable diamond necklace. On route to her uncle, who has offered to buy it, their carriage is overturned by a fast-driving baronet, Sir Edmund Blount, and in the confusion the necklace is stolen. Lizzie and Edmund are at odds instantly, but he chivalrously decides to help them recover the necklace, and thereby sets in train a glorious sequence of ever more unlikely escapades as they chase around the country in pursuit of a wall-eyed man in a green coat who is the chief suspect.

So far, so promising, but the real fly in the ointment for me was that the book I read immediately before this was another Joan Smith effort, called Love’s Way. And here’s the kicker – its plot is almost identical to this one. The heroine (and her aunt!) are in dire financial straits, thrown together with an antagonistic hero with whom the heroine feuds in melodramatic fashion throughout the book. And although this book at least has some indication that the hero is actually falling for the heroine, she never admits to it, and (just like the previous book) there’s no romantic ending just a shrug and I-suppose-we’d-better-get-married air of resignation. So although I enjoyed the whole thing quite a lot, it was rather spoilt for me by the repetition.

There is one element of the story that I found very funny, but purists might take exception to. Sir Edmund, having been a contented bachelor for a number of years, and having no intention ever to marry, has developed the habit of seeking out female company of a certain type when he’s travelling. He doesn’t stray from the moral code when he’s at home where he’s a respectable figure and wants to keep his reputation, but when he’s away from home he likes a bit of how’s-your-father. This leads to some very funny moments when he’s trying to arrange something, or is actually about to embark upon it, when Lizzie interrupts. Naturally, he gets quite cross about this.

In fact, Edmund’s moods are one of the most entertaining aspects of the book, for they veer about quite dramatically in response to whatever is going forward, and whether he sees it as positive or negative, and although Aunt Maisie soon sees what he’s about, Lizzie never does, and fails to notice that Edmund’s moods are increasingly concerned with her attitude to him.

It’s all great fun, despite being ridiculously implausible, but the sense of deja vu keeps it to four stars for me.

This was a complete riot. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but oh boy, was it funny! The hero and heroine were at odds throughout the book, so they threw everything at each other, verbally, and it was glorious.

Here’s the premise: Chloe Barwick is struggling to manage the run-down family estate since her younger brother, Edward, who should be in charge, is obsessed with becoming a poet instead. While he is dreaming up lurid verses and hobnobbing with the Lake District’s resident poets, she’s left to cope with making the sheep raising pay, and trying to scrape together enough money to pay the mortgage every quarter. Aunt Nora, who lives with them, isn’t much help, either. The neighbours, drunken Lord Carnforth and his seemingly innocent daughter Emily are even worse off, living in absolute squalor. So when Emily starts calling on a daily basis and hanging around the interesting Edward, a marriage is out of the question. Edward must marry money to rescue the estate. Chloe herself could rescue them, of course, if only she’d marry Tom Carrick and his five thousand a year. It’s a pity she can’t stand him.

Into this stasis appears the explosive person of Jack Gamble, Lord Carnforth’s nephew, the traditional black sheep, so beloved of Regencies, who’s just returned from India with a fortune in his pocket (another very traditional trope). He immediately sets up Chloe’s back by frightening Emily into running away to Chloe and Edward’s house, from where Jack, in a towering rage, removes her, sets her up with a chaperone and sets about turning her into a pampered rich lady. She seems to enjoy the attention and he seems to be seriously wooing her, and even offers for her, before beginning to discover that behind the barbed tongue, Chloe has a lot of sterling qualities and is far more interesting than ingenue Emily.

This sets up a nice merry-go-round of romances. Will Emily accept Jack’s offer? Will Edward care if she does? Will Chloe see the good in Jack or end up with uninteresting Tom Carrick and his five thousand pounds? The book is a vintage era Regency, so the romance is desperately short on emotion (I don’t think the hero and heroine ever actually come out and say they love each other). Instead, it’s high on the froth of banter and light-heartedly swapping from one potential mate to another, almost as if it doesn’t quite matter. And when they decide that, no, they won’t marry that person after all, it’s a simple matter of saying so. This is not consistent with any Regency code of conduct that I know.

In the background is the villain of the piece, who, in a light-hearted and jovial way, is determined to turn this corner of the Lake District into a vulgar theme park, with every possible tasteless attraction. The Barwick’s house is so run-down that he thinks he’ll just buy it when they inevitably default on the mortgage, knock it down and build a road through it. This part of the story wasn’t so interesting that I wanted to read every last detail of the plans, but it was definitely more interesting than the endless descriptions of the scenery and how to run a sheep farm. All this might have been more convincing without the mention of skunks harassing the sheep and cardinals singing melodically in the beech tree. Nor was I impressed by Edward deciding to organise a fox hunt in the middle of summer (I’m sure the farmers would be thrilled to have the hunt rampaging through their fields and trampling crops and scaring the sheep – save it for the winter months, please).

But you know, none of this mattered tuppence, because the book is *funny*. It’s written in first person for Chloe (‘I went…’ instead of ‘she went…’), and that means the reader is right inside Chloe’s gloriously witty, curmudgeonly and downright cynical head. It’s wonderful stuff, and if I would have liked a little bit less of the theme park villainy and a little more emotion, I can accept that the book is very much of its era, where the characters are slightly cartoonish and not the fully rounded type we expect nowadays. Despite the skunks and cardinals, the sheer enjoyment of the banter makes this a five star read for me.