Jane Leslie never dreamt when she first heard of the House of a Thousand Lanterns that she might one day live there, or that it might end up being the death of her.
This is another somewhat lackluster Victoria Holt gothic romance rescued by the quality of her writing and the strong main character. I did enjoy also going out to colonial Hong Kong, though you must take the attitudes of most of the characters with a grain of salt in regards to the custom of the time. There’s some truly eerie moments as Jane is besieged by possibly unseen enemies in her home, and I enjoyed following Jane as she develops from a rather naive and sheltered teenager to a businesswoman in her own right.
But at the same time, there’s a good amount of repetition to really hammer in that the House of a Thousand Lanterns is Bad News and Extremely Creepy, and it wears after a while. Also, Jane’s love interest Joliffe is the least appealing of all her romantic prospects, and after she repeatedly enumerates the many reasons he is untrustworthy and slick, I wanted to yell at her to go after one of her other choices.
Also, the solution of the mystery is full of holes, but Holt tries to hand-wave those away with a vague ‘oowoo the mysterious ways of the foreign Chinese,’ which is especially frustrating because on the whole she seems to have tried to be respectful of the differences in culture, if in a dated 1975 way.
