Bed Ruin. By A. N. Homer. (Ward and Downey.),—This "Tale
of West African River-Life" is a well-told story. An English trader has to fight for his life with the neighbouring African potentate. The struggle is all the more fiercely waged because he has a recently arrived inmate in his house, his niece Joyce. Just in the nick of time arrives an English traveller who has made his way from the interior. Then comes in the element of jealousy and treachery, and the reader is worked up to a pitch of excitement. Mr. Homer knows, we take it, the scenery which he describes, and the manners of the country. His pictures of Nature and of life are brilliant, and, on the whole, he has made a decided success in Bed Ruin.—Another tale of the sensational kind is That French- man ! By Archibald Clavering Gunter. (Routledge and Sons.) —Mr. Gunter is the author of a very successful story, "Kr.
Barnes of New York," but he has not equalled that effort in the volume now before us. It is a story of the police and of the plots which threatened the Second French Empire in its later years. There is far too much detail. It is only a very patient reader who will work his way through it, and keep his hand on the thread of so entangled a plot. The hero is an amateur detective who shames the incapacity of the police. We are thus reminded of certain sketches of Edgar Poe ; but there is a vast difference between the broad, masterly outline of Poe and the minute work of Mr. Clavering.
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