MISS PHILADELPHIA SMITH

Broadly good-natured Regency romance, without Georgette Heyer's polished period idiom, but wheeled along at an efficient clip. Any reader savvy to the choreography of the genre will, at the onset, predict the final arrangement of the four amorous principals: uncommonly pretty, sensible, and impoverished Philadelphia: Jamie, her reticent and respectable fiance, sent packing when he announces a six months trip abroad; elegant toff Tom Atherton next door; and his ebullient mistress Emma, also from the ton. Tom offers the wan Philadelphia assistance after her mother's death and plans a gentlemanly conquest. Although jealously infuriated by this set of events, Emma is horrified when told of a plan to ruin Philadelphia by Tom's evil enemy, and after a nick-of-time rescue of Philadelphia from the Fleet Street prison marriage mill and, after Emma saves Tom's life with a well-placed pistol shot, the ladies become fast friends. With the return of Jamie, who has tasted low life as Philadelphia has sampled high, it all sorts out into an acceptable swatch of lovers-and-lasses material.