The third in Trollope's six-volume Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds boasts an extraordinary heroine in Lizzie Eustace, a lying schemer in the mould of Thackeray's Becky Sharp. A pompous Under-Secretary of State, an exploitative and acquisitive American and her unhappy "niece," a shady radical peer, and a brutal aristocrat are only some of the characters in this, one of Trollope's most engaging novels: part sensation fiction, part detective story,...