"The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters

I had so much fun reading this book. It was like a ghost story in Downton Abbey (if Robert Crawley had died and the house had fallen into disrepair), only the house was called Hundreds Hall and was owned by the Ayreses. The story is told through the eyes of the family doctor who has lived in the area all his life and can remember the Hall as it was when he was a child. Dr Faraday is shocked at seeing the state of the house thirty years later, when he is called to see to a young housemaid complaining of a bellyache. Over the following weeks and months he finds himself back at Hundreds Hall more and more often, and as the Ayres family become accustomed to his presence, they begin to reveal to him the strange things that are going on in the house.

It's frustrating in a delicious way when I want to devour a book but I also don't want it to end. I wish I could still be reading this book now. And while I find in retrospect that it doesn't necessarily stand up to much scrutiny, that does nothing to diminish my agreement that (like the cover says) this is "a classic gothic page-turner."