On the day after the battle of Waterloo, a number of people set up a fund, the interest on the principle being shared among the surviving investors. This device allows Costain to explore nineteenth century society and indulge in a variety of novelistic sub-genres. It was low sress to write, and gave the author a chance to show his skill level. I don't recall it as being particularly striking to an adolescent living on the canadian prairies. ( )

Costain, author of The Silver Chalice, et al, has a good sense of a panorama of history; his characterizations are generally well-drawn, if oftentimes drawn from stock. The plot is not as swashbuckling as I thought it would be, but it certainly kept the attention for 900+ pages. My only quibble with him is that while I see he needs to stretch out the story from 1814-1870 something, (the dates are seldom clear, intentionally), there are characters that come and go, hundreds of them, 90% of whom you never hear of again--others you need to remember for a 400 page gap when they pop up again. The text could have used either a list of characters or a family tree to help the poor reader out. The story involves wresting a tontine from a blackguard and legitimizing it--a tontine is a sort of insurance policy annuity and a lottery all in one, whereby one receives money every year from it, and as people in the 'class' of tontine die off, one received more and more each year. The climax of the story is the intrigue that happens when the tontine is down to 3 old players, who know each other and who coincidentally live near each other. There are moments of adventure, but otherwise many subplots that aren't terribly interesting and go nowhere. Nonetheless, if you have the time and like a quasi-adventure story, it's a classic of its kind. ( )