Interesting. Classic gothic romance - I loved these things when I was a teenager; I may have read this when I was a teenager - it was published in 1965, guess I wasn't a teenager. A Jane Eyre opening - a young nurse goes to tend a mad girl in a Scottish castle (relocated stone by stone to some indefinite location on an island somewhere off some coast of the United States). There she finds a dying old man and his operatically dramatic wife - and his brooding adult son - and the charismatic keeper of the bird sanctuary on the island.
All the gothic cliches are there - insanity, murder, blackmail, secret passages, smuggler's caves which are submerged at high tide, and a deadly hurricane. Not to mention a Newfoundland named Thumbelina.
Maybe Thumbelina saves it (as well as the heroine) from utter disaster. It is well written - for this sort of thing - from Bradley it would have to be. McCaffrey's romances stop short of the gothic cliche, this book completely embraces it. It was her fourth published novel, perhaps she was still searching for a marketable genre.
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