A few weird parts because of superstitious villagers. Not D.E. Stevenson's best, but easy light reading. ( )

Sent to me by SylviaC several years ago, and wondered what had taken me so long. The characters reminded me of the Green family in Green Money. A very nice visit. ( )

Kate Hardy is so successful a novelist, ‘obviously well off and very impulsive’, that she can afford to buy the Dower House from Richard Morven ‘as if it were – a bun.’

The sale of the Dower House is a bitter necessity for Richard Morven. It ‘was such a lovely little house, so gracious and dignified. It was older than the Manor ... it had been built by Morvens for Morvens to live in and now a Morven had sold it. He felt like a traitor.’ But post Second World War Britain has changed and many people, like one of the cottager’s sons Major Walter Stack DSO, no longer know their ‘proper place’.

So Kate Hardy retires from London to the village of Old Quinings and her new acquisition and she becomes entwined in the lives of the Morvens. She soon finds that this quiet English village is not what is seems as there is a spate of poison pen letters and inferences of witchcraft as well as gossip good and ill. ‘But the people seem so friendly, so – so wholesome and sensible.’ ‘Some of them are.’