A Ruthless Avenger. By Mrs. Conney. (Hutchinson.)—Thie at least must
be conceded to Mrs. Conney, that, although her new book is in three volumes, and although she occasionally writes too splendidly, she is never tedious. This negative success, on the other hand, is explained by the circumstance that her volumes, while filled with incidents, are in no sense hampered by them. This is especially true of the leading event, the murder of the young Countess of Fairfield. It is a mystery, the secret of which is preserved almost to the end, and with a skill worthy of the biographer of Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. It is undeniable, too, that both the chief villain and the chief hero are good portraits, even although the conversion of the wicked Captain Danvers into the polished scoundrel Trevanion, and of Ralph Evelyn, the good man who is suspected of being a. thief and murderer, into Ricardo, "the millionaire before whom all London had bowed in worship," is a rather hackneyed device. Then the happiness of Ralph Evelyn and Lady Helen is postponed to a positively delicious extent. Altogether, A Ruthless Avenger is a capital story of a possibly too conventional kind.
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