The Minotaur - Barbara Vine

A middle-aged Swedish woman remembers her strange and horrifying stay with an English family at their grand house in Essex almost forty years before, when the sixties revolution had barely reached rural England. The grown-up Cosway daughters were in thrall to their widowed mother, but it was the son John who puzzled Kerstin: why was this sad, self-absorbed figure being fed such large doses of unsuitable drugs? Then, as Kerstin began to realize what was going on, a stranger moved into the village, and his presence set the whole family on a path to self-destruction.