There's no family like an unhappy family, and there's no family more unhappy than the Mackenzies, whose only daughter has married down, down, down, wincingly down. Yet there's something more about the hated son-in law – himself an accomplished hater – to give a chill to Isabel, the Mackenzies' redoubtable matriarch with a volatile secret in her past. He is more than merely awful; he is more formidable than that. Who is he, really? Who is he, exactly? There is only one possible answer, and, like many of life's greatest truths, that answer is too shocking to believe.