The Last Highwayman

In the 1880s, duchess Christina Wentworth-Gibbons, a young widow, is about to leave London to avoid the Prince of Wales (who, ``in an effort to humble her, had inflicted on her every sexual deviation he could think of'') when she is abducted by Richard Wycliffe, aka ``the Brighton Bandit.'' Richard assumed his alias after his father, a British earl, brought him to Ireland with troops to suppress a rebellion; Richard, whose mother was Irish, unknowingly killed his half-sister and, since then, has defended the ``sacred cause,'' bombing the Bank of England as well as robbing English travelers, fencing the goods in the U.S. and using the money to smuggle arms into Ireland. Once abducted, Christina of course falls in love with her dashing brigand and aids him in his cause. When Oscar Wilde (who, alas, is exploited to serve as a character here) recounts an errand he has run for Christina, he calls it ``sloppy melodrama at best.'' This is also an apt assessment of O'Neal's first novel, which fails either to entertain or to comment meaningfully on the Irish-British conflict that is dragged into the narrative. (Mar.)