""Now tell us about your crime novel. Take my advice and don't try to be intellectual over it. What the public likes is blood." The Surrays and their five children form a prolific writing machine, with scores of treatises, reviews, and crime thrillers published under their family name. Following a rare convergence of the whole household at their Oxfordshire home, Ruth-middle sister who writes "books which are just books"- decides to spend some weeks...

"Retired professor Emily Cavanaugh and her husband, Luke, are taking a much-needed break from Windy Corner and spending their honeymoon five thousand miles away as paying guests at Fizhugh Manor in Oxfordshire. Quaint nearby villages and the manor's impressive turrets and arches capture Emily's Anglophile heart, but when she meets its dashing young heir, James Fitzhugh and his American wife, Allison, James's cousin Penelope, his dithering uncle Roger...