This book reminded me of the old days, and not in a good way. Remember the days when heroes and heroines in a romance novel met for the first time around page one-hundred? Remember how they barely spoke? Remember how they separated for what seemed like ages? Remember skimming the book to find out when they would bump into each other again?

Reading The Highwayman, with its familiar Robin Hood plot, was a lot like reading those old books. When a plot is very familiar you need a great romance on which to focus attention. Unfortunately the hero and heroine of The Highwayman spend most of their time apart leaving the reader rather bored and wondering when they will get together again..

As the story opens Lord Neville, Earl of Clonmore, is living two lives. By day he’s an Irish aristocrat, a man with a scar so severe he wears a mask to cover it. At night he’s the dashing masked Gentleman Niall, robbing coaches that hold the tenants rent money and secretly helping the poor.

Lord Neville wins the estate, Kilmara, from Lord Wentworth in a card game. This land will provide safe haven for his secret life. To his astonishment, Lord Neville discovers that to take the prize he must marry Lord Wentworth’s beautiful 21-year-old daughter, Lady Elizabeth, to whom the land is entailed. Lady Elizabeth lives in England and has never seen Ireland.

On the journey to meet her betrothed, Elizabeth’s coach is attacked, not by Gentleman Niall but by a competing gang of genuine villains. Gentleman Niall comes along and takes care of these louts, winning Elizabeth’s heart. It is love at first sight, but the meeting is soon over. Later when Elizabeth formally meets and marries Lord Neville, she recognizes him as Gentleman Niall, the bandit who saved her. For the rest of the book Elizabeth strives to gain Neville’s trust and to form a real marriage.

But Lord Neville has his hands full and doesn’t trust his wife not to give him away. The Irish gentry are plotting to capture Gentleman Niall and Lord Neville knows it. They have hired the bounty hunter, Sir Anthony Addams. Sir Anthony soon identifies Elizabeth as his best witness, as she has encountered Gentleman Naill and seemed to get a better look at him than anyone else.

Elizabeth is more intelligent than many young heroines. Never having lived in Ireland she is appalled by conditions among the tenants and the political repression she sees around her. She asks many questions about the repression of the Irish people and author Anne Kelleher answers them well.

Neville is a man committed to helping the Irish, though it seems he must do it in the most dramatic way possible. Brought up by his mother, he is the son of a violent and selfish father. He likes the idea of being a traitor to his class. Neville’s mother Moira is an interesting character, a woman who left her husband and supported herself as a mistress to wealthy men in London. It is to the author’s credit that Moira is presented as a mature person, not just a woman with a past.

It is really too bad when a book with good characters, a reasonably entertaining plot and professional writing isn’t more fun to read than this one. The pacing of this story just killed it for me. The Highwayman is only two hundred and seventy pages long. Yet by page one hundred and thirty Elizabeth and Neville have only met twice, each time for less than fifteen minutes. When Elizabeth and Neville marry there is another separation as she is immediately sent off to live away from her husband. Even after Elizabeth and Neville do make contact you have the distinct feeling that the author is unsure of what to do with them when they are together. They spend a great deal of time talking to others – Moira for example – about each other.

The Highwayman is not a bad novel. It is just hum drum because you spend so much time waiting for the love story. The plot is fine for a romance novel but it is not interesting enough to hold up without lovers. In spite of this I will probably try Anne Kelleher again. She has a smooth intelligent writing style and a believable way of describing a historical scene. As I closed the book I had to smile, wondering what I might have thought of it years ago when I read those old historicals.