While as a teenager, I certainly was on a huge Victoria Holt kick for a while, even then, I was of course already more than well cognizant of just how decidedly and actually usually really horribly formulaic Holt's historical mysteries and romances for the most part tended to be. And yes, most of my teenaged reading reading pleasure with regard to Victoria Holt's fiction generally and actually tended to consist primarily of enjoying the author's lushly descriptive time and place settings and also bien sûr trying to figure out who the chief villains, who the main nasties of her stories were (which was generally easy enough and in fact often way too much so). However, even though Victoria Holt might often if not even regularly get her historical time and place settings right enough for novels set in the United Kingdom (and especially in England), in my humble opinion, Victoria Holt far too much and far too often seems to get this quite massively wrong and also becomes textually strangely convoluted when she tries to pen stories set outside of the British Isles, since yes indeed, Holt's 1981 novel The Judas Kiss is sadly a really horribly shining example thereof. For the entire storyline of The Judas Kiss, it does tend to feel (and both now and also when I originally read the novel in 1983) as though I am in fact encountering a fairy tale set in a rather fictional Middle Ages and not really and truly a story taking place in 19th century Bavaria. And indeed the chief villains of The Judas Kiss (aside from them being so on the surface and obvious that I almost immediately was able to figure them out), they are all and sundry (and in my opinion) so über-vile and nasty, so stereotypically evil and conniving that not only was (and is) reading The Judas Kiss a total exercise in monotony, it also often felt (and continues to feel) as though Victoria Holt is writing The Judas Kiss with perhaps an inadvertent but still to and for me rather noticeable anti-German sentiment and attitude present. Therefore, combined with the fact that even the main protagonist and first person narrator of The Judas Kiss, that Pippa Elwell is at best rather inconsistent and often really quite strangely thoughtless, while when I read The Judas Kiss as a teenager, I was still able to mildly enjoy Pippa as a character, today, upon rereading The Judas Kiss, I do simply and utterly find Pippa hugely annoying and totally frustrating and so much so that indeed, I can and will only consider The Judas Kiss with but one star (and to only recommend it with very serious reservations and to Victoria Holt completists).