19 JUNE 1886, Page 27

Killed in the Open. By Mrs. Edward Kennard. 3 vols.

(Chap- man and Hall.)—Mrs. Kennard mixes her ingredients of love and sport with average skill. The mixtures, however, would have been better without the bitter flavour of tragedy which she thinks proper to introduce. Tragedy is out of place in a book of this kind, which should be gay from beginning to end, or else it is in danger of missing its only possible aim, to amuse. We may hint to the author that she would make her books more agreeable if the women were not so skilful and jealous. What they may be in the hunting-field, and in the drawing-room to which the hunting-Feld furnishes the only topics of conversation, we do not know ; but, to judge by ordinary people, Mrs. Kennard's pictures are libels.