The Gabriel Hounds

The Gabriel Hounds is a novel of suspense by the English writer Mary Stewart, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1967. It is set in Lebanon and Syria, and it belongs with her books that set a romance inside a mystery.

Christy Mansel is travelling in the Middle East when she meets her cousin Charles in Damascus. The two of them are wealthy, restless and accustomed to getting their own way, and the discovery that their great-aunt Harriet is living nearby is too good an opportunity to pass up, even though the family long ago agreed that nobody visits Dar Ibrahim without an invitation. Lady Harriet's palace is old and half-ruined, and the household around her is stranger than the family legend suggested.

Stewart keeps the novel close to Christy's point of view, so the reader learns what she learns, at the pace she learns it, in a house where the servants watch the visitors and the family history has been told differently by everyone who tells it. The cousins get their wish for an adventure and find that being related to Lady Harriet is not the same as being welcome.