Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller (1850–1937)

Four stars for sheer entertainment value. I can see why dime novels were so popular.

Eh Gad! It's been a while since I dipped into the dime novels and they really are pretty badly written, makes my complaints on His Grace of Osmonde seem pretty petty. This was your standard misunderstanding lovers with wholly transparent plot twists and reams of bad poetry. Honestly, she has a tremendous talent for padding out a story with useless doggerel. I'll stay away from Mrs. Miller for a while again.

I think the dime novels are well and fully played out for me. This one started out fairly promising, with some intrigue and mystery, but soon got back to the usual level of melodrama: secrets kept and identities hidden and instant love in their eyes. This has a ghost, which was an interesting touch and even mention of an attempted murder by tying to a railroad track but eventually it all came out happy (except for the usual dead villians).

This was mostly one mad dash from begining to end. She starts with a bang of revealing mosts of the fairly obvious famliy secrets and then spends a fair amount of time (and reams of mostly awful poetry) spinning out the final twists and turns. And early effort and it shows.