Max Patterson has spent the past twelve years living in a Gothic mansion writing bestselling horror novels. He is rich, enjoys the eccentric image he cultivates assiduously among the locals in West Cork, and likes to feel that he is self-sufficient. Only trouble is, he's not. A childhood trauma has left him confined to a wheelchair, dependent on his housekeeper and her chauffeur husband. He has lived for so long in the inner world of his horror fiction, he has forgotten how to deal with the real one outside his mansion gates. So when he is told that his best friend has been killed in a car crash and left him responsible for his two children, Max couldn't be more horrified. The only children he's had to deal with up to now have been in his books, sacrificed horribly by an imaginary cult and offered up to Satan. Caroline, a pretty, recalcitrant fifteen-year-old, and her ten-year-old computer nerd brother Nigel duly arrive at Cork airport. Both are shell-shocked by the loss of their parents and are as unhappy as Max about their move to Ireland. How will Max cope with the teenage problems of alcohol, drugs, exploding hormones and Dawsons' Creek? How will he steer Nigel through adolescence when he has yet to complete his own? Above all, how can he ask Kate, his attractive, articulate Girl Friday, with whom he is rapidly falling in love, to spend the rest of her life with a man who'll never walk?