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Many Mary Stewart books wax rhapsodic about scenic locales, but The Stormy Petrel, more than any of the others, reads like Mary Stewart went somewhere lovely on vacation and decided she wanted to tell us all about it and only somewhat later remembered that her usual genre often required at least a veneer of plot.

The premise: Rose Fenemore is an academic and writer who wants to find somewhere quiet to work on her poetry and science fiction novels. She arranges to meet her brother for a long vacation in a cottage on an extremely beautiful, moderately isolated island, and then spends the next fifty pages or so describing how successful her writing retreat was while her brother is delayed by various minor catastrophes, and yes, all right, Mary Stewart, now I also would like to go for a writing retreat on an extremely beautiful, moderately isolated island, you did your job, well done.

Oh, but right! The plot! One night two strangers turn up independently at her cottage doorstep with stories about how they're related to the cottage and the big house on the island, either of whom might hypothetically be sinister, and involve the protagonist in drama ...

And then one of them turns out to be perfectly nice in the next scene, and the other one turns out to be a petty criminal, exactly like all of the islanders said he was, but not really in a way that's at all threatening to our heroine, he was just there to steal the silver from the big house. I kept waiting for there to turn out to be some twist about all of this, but there is absolutely none, by which I must conclude that this book is not a Gothic, a.) because there's no peril and b.) because the stranger who looks nice is indeed nice and the stranger who looks shady is indeed shady!

Anyway they sort that all out, and then Rose's brother turns up with a friend who's a developer and wants to turn the island into a golf course, so there's a last-twenty-five-pages surprise plot about scaring off the developer, who also turns out to be perfectly nice and rescues a stormy petrel. No golf course! The island is safe for the right kind of vacation! The charms of which Mary Stewart would be happy to explain to you at greater length, you didn't really need to do anything this summer besides visit a scenic Scottish beach, did you?

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Have you read Rose Cottage or Thornyhold? Those have the same ratio of gorgeous location to extremely mild peril as Stormy Petrel, and that same quality of "Why yes, Mary Stewart, I WOULD like to take a vacation/inherit a cottage in this place!"

They're also all late-career books for her, so I wonder if she just got tired of Peril and settled down to her true loves: charming cottages and plucky heroines with an extensive supply of quotations forever at their fingertips. If so, good on her. They were charming in a very different way than her early books were charming - really not gothic at all, as you say - but once I had adjusted my gothic-o-meter, I find them delightful in a different way.

I always feel that I might want to take up fishing after reading Stewart. (Her and John Buchan for the mountain climbing.)

It is so difficult to arrange to inherit cottages these days.

This one has quite a lot of bird-watching and I know I absolutely do not have the patience for bird-watching, and yet.

I have not! All the other Stewarts I've read are the quite dramatic ones -- and, I mean, Madam, Will You Talk? and Wildfire at Midnight also do have a bit that air of "I went on vacation someplace lovely and now I'm going to tell you all about it!" (which is part of what makes them such good vacation reads) but the ratio of Peril to Scenery is extremely differently weighted ...

Thornyhold does have a certain amount of horror-peril, IIRC (though I don't 100% love the way it resolves), but you're right, it's also definitely primarily about the joys of being a plucky heroine in a charming cottage in an idyllic setting with just enough peril to keep things interesting for the length of a book. Not terribly gothic at all! But I go to Mary Stewart for the prose and the heroines and the poetic descriptions of scenery (and occasional intrusions of magic when she just can't help herself) more than the gothic plots, really, so that's fine with me.

I haven't read Rose Cottage or The Stormy Petrel yet, though, and now I am reminded that I should add them to the TBR list.