The House of Whispers

I have a prejudice against novels that reveal the bad guys at the outset, unless there's plenty of action. This one moves slowly, with lots of exposition not essential to the plot. Moreover, the heroine — for all we're told she's clever and learned — is a nitwit, and most of the other characters dull, unsympathetic and unrealistic. The young woman, the mainstay of her blind, but very rich father, is being blackmailed, and behaves stupidly about it. Her father, an important politician before losing his sight, an eminent antiquarian and supposedly brilliantly (if mysteriously) still transacting business worth a fortune, despite his handicap, is nevertheless presented as a wretched, helpless, self-pitying old man, who is readily taken in by lies about his devoted and previously beloved daughter, while never believing any ugly tales about his wife. Nobody except his perfidious wife (the evil stepmother) and the principal villain ever seems to take advantage of the old man's enormous wealth, and though we're told the latter has some hold over her, too, we're never told what it is. Really an unsatisfactory book.