Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter

An engrossing, if melodramatic, thriller about a plucky young woman ill-treated by her larcenous stepfather and her duplicitous lover, and her complex plot for revenge.

The previous reviewer has described this book so well, that I have nothing to add but corroboration.
Read and enjoy. An unusual book.

What at first appears to be a stiff and archaic romance soon becomes a roaring melodrama of schemes, ploys and vengeance. It is written in an archaic and sometimes stilted style, but if you can appreciate an extremely compound sentence describing souls brimming over with complex emotions, this can be quite enjoyable. The protagonist is no fainting flower (once she overcomes that uniquely 19th century affliction which appears to be a mere swoon but threatens to become a "brain fever" which endangers her very life!!) but a fierce fighter bent on avenging the memory of her sainted mother and bringing justice down upon the heads of an ever-expanding coterie of scoundrels. This is a pocket universe containing only a dozen or so people, whose lives are intermeshed in the most remarkably coincidental ways, most of them having some dire hold upon each other. I found I had zipped through 90 pages before I was compelled to retire for the evening, and am writing this now while still in the midst of appreciating this highly unrealistic but thoroughly enjoyable bit of fluff. There is no way to justify its enjoyment as educational or socially redeeming - it's just for fun. I am sure that in its day it set many a delicate heart aflutter with sympathy and excitement, as it has mine.