SOURCE: "Victim or Victor?," in The New York Times Book Review, July 14, 1985, p. 19.

In the following review, Gaiser examines Blackwood's depiction in Corrigan of victimization and malice.

In Corrigan, her fourth novel, the Irish writer Caroline Blackwood continues to expose the menace lurking beneath the seemingly benign surface of everyday life. Domesticity, for Miss Blackwood, has never been cozy; she listens for the ticking of the time bomb in the teapot. Her brilliantly executed thriller The Fate of Mary Rose offered a devastating portrait of a marriage of convenience in which a child and her father become the victims of a crazed mother's obsession.

The nature of victimization—and by implication of good and evil—is a recurring theme in Miss Blackwood's work. In Corrigan she has written a delightfully ingenious variation on a familiar story—the aging widow preyed on by a charming confidence man.

Devina Blunt...