For Love Of Crannagh Castle — Brian Cleeve

Conor Dwyer, an actor and television scriptwriter, has always lived - and loved - very much in the present. In his forty-even years he has known a startling assortment of women. But he had never met any as strangely beautiful - and strangely affecting - as Mary Falk.

Con and Mary meet and fall in love at Crannagh, a fabulous eighteenth-century Irish castle filled with rich and exotic treasure - all of it booty of two hundred years of British empire-building. Mary is only a poor relation of the rich Englishwomen who have just inherited the castle. Yet she seems more at home there than the new owners, or even con, who grew up in the country surrounding Crannagh's walls. As his love grows, Con sees that Mary is powerfully and inexplicably drawn to the castle. Inside the walls, among rare old objects, she seems to find a meaning which has, until now, eluded her.

Her relatives' response is simpler: they plan to auction off the contents of the castle, then raze the building and begin mining the rich deposits of zinc that lie below. As Mary's lover, Con finds himself drawn into her fight to save Crannagh from its plunderers. Only too late does he realize that Crannagh itself has always been his rival.