It occurs to me that one of the reasons Heyer has rapidly become a comfort read for me, while the Hamish Macbeth ones are now "don't bother", is that Heyer *likes* her characters, even when they're horribly flawed people, and Beaton seems to despise most of her characters to the point of not bothering to flesh them out properly. The White Russian prince in this book is a sleaze, but Heyer shows you enough of him through the eyes of different characters to understand both that he's a sleaze, and why some of the characters adore him.