Helpful Score: 3
An early effort of Pilcher's, one of my favorite authors. Her later novel Wild Mountain Thyme is a better, fuller reworking of this early effort. The older man in this story, lawyer David Stewart, is similar to the high-powered older man in WMT; the Sinclair character here is like Oliver Dobbs in WMT, and so on. Many of her female characters are younger and end up with older men, however, in her more recent book, Winter Solstice, her female character is an older woman, probably because Pilcher was, by then, older herself. Her characters in WMT are more fully developed than in this book, the scenery better imagined, the house and basic plot are all more complex, especially the character of Roddy whose house burns down in WMT. Even so, I am glad I swapped this book because after reading it, I can easily see how Pilcher's talents grew with her writing. I wish she were still writing more stories -- I enjoy them so and have kept copies of all of them because I read them over again from time to time.
