I went through a Heyer phase several years ago and sort of stalled out on it (I find there's an extremely steep diminishing-returns curve on her books - I love them in direct inverse proportion to how many of them I've read lately, starting off at love and sliding very fast into "I feel like I've read the same book three times in a row and it's rapidly losing its appeal") but anyway, I stopped before I ran out of books, so I've had Faro's Daughter hanging around in Mt. TBR ever since, and finally decided to read it. This book is so, so hilarious and adorable. It might be giving The Foundling some competition for Favorite Heyer Ever.

I got to the point where things have escalated to the heroine having her love interest kidnapped and locked in the cellar and then doesn't know exactly what to do with him, while there's an entire gambling establishment upstairs full of his family, her family, her erstwhile fiancé - basically all the people who really, really need to NOT know he's down here - and meanwhile he refuses to even entertain the idea of just allowing her to let him out because that would mean LOSING. I keep having to put the book down to laugh. Heyer's deadpan narration is so great.

(For context, at this point he's tied to "a Windsor chair thoughtfully placed there by Miss Grantham," while she alternates between threatening him and trying to make up for how guilty she feels over the whole thing.)

"Will you have some more wine, sir?" asked Deborah, apparently conscious of her duties as his hostess.

"No," said Ravenscar baldly.

"You are not very polite!" she said.

"I do not feel very polite. If you care to untie my ankles, however, I will engage to offer you my chair."

I love them.

This book is built entirely on ridiculous misunderstandings and characters failing to tell each other the whole truth for reasons, and yet it's put together in such a way that it's irresistible.