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I ought to like Caroline Blackwood's work more than I do. Her rich literary and historical connections - Ulster Anglo-Irish aristocracy with the Guinness fortune no less, wife to poet Robert Lowell and artist Lucien Freud, a distant relation to famed Victorian ghost story generator Algernon Blackwood - seem perfect for those of us who like our Downtown Abbeys a little less cheerfully Anglo and a little more vengefully Irish. And so I gave this Amazon recommendation a try precisely because the plot of a charming but disabled Irishman fundraising for his hospital in the very heart of cottage and garden Southern England seemed like it would yield a good deal of cultural interplay and emotional tension. And that IS there - though not quite in the form I expected - and even the attraction and passion between English widow and the titular character had a sort of perfunctory quality to it. I was amazed to find I was far more engrossed in the plight of Nadine, the daughter caught in a perfect - and perfectly loveless - marriage, who grapples with her own losses under the great shadow of her mother's grief.

It was a great gallop of a read: Amazon delivered it Monday afternoon and it now lies exhausted on my night stand this Wednesday morning.

As for Anglo-Irish families doing each other in with frigid kindness and fine china chipped at the edges: Molly Keane is your only man.