Charles Palliser exercises his usual exquisitely intricate, not to say merciless, plotting, as a young man sent down from Cambridge joins his widowed mother and his sister in a dilapidated gothic pile in a remote part of the southern English coast. Troubling mysteries hang over his departure from college, the death of his father and the affairs of his sister, but worse is yet to come. Poisonous neighbours, astonishingly awful letters, animal mutilation, opium addiction, obsessive sexual desire (not to say ignorance and fear of female desire - very Victorian) create a simmering stew of fear, uncertainty and incipient violence. The text is such that the reader will be a few steps ahead of poor old Richard - but with the nagging uncertainty of how reliable a narrator he really is - but Palliser keeps you guessing until the final jaws of the trap spring shut. A deliciously monstrous read.