Snare of Serpents is pretty much your usual Victoria Holt suspense novel with heroine in peril, etc. etc. Davina Glentyre's peaceful life in Edinburgh is rocked when her beloved governess is fired for stealing and in comes a younger, prettier governess. A governess who ends up marrying her widowed father. A widowed father who ends up dead from arsenic poisoning. Being a typical Holt novel, Davina is the one who gets the blame ('course she's innocent), put on trial and found "Not Proven" - a stigma that's not so easy to live with. FF and Davina eventually decides to start life again in South Africa where no one will whisper those dreaded words behind her back. Hah.This was an OK read, but it did lag at times when the storyline could have moved along a bit faster. Most of the twists and turns were fairly easy to guess well before the big reveal, and it took waaaaaaaaay too long to wrap things up at the end.
What can I say? Every book of Victoria Holt follows the same pattern: a sweet innocent child that becomes a damsel in distress who ends up being a miss Independent Woman. It includes lots of love-affairs (usually with a very Bad Young Man and then with the Perfect Gentleman) and family secrets and murders (usually you know who the murderer is in page 2, but the little damsel doesn't suspect anything until the very last page). But...what can I do? I do love this kind of dramatic, old-fashioned novels. I love them. They're always the break I need between heavier (and "better") books. And, as I always say, 'Mamma I love the drama' :D
