Shadow of the Lynx

I read this when I was a kid and it gave me VERY WEIRD KID IDEAS.  Now I'm returning to it and it is... even more fucked up than I expected?  Nora is one of those freshly orphaned smart Vicky Holt girls.  Charles Herrick, aka the Lynx, is a... brilliant sex monster?  It's hard to explain.  There's another dude too.  And a whole other family.  Is this even a romance novel?  Is this maybe a thriller?  I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE. This is going to be okay for most people but there's definitely an extremely controlling man, there's an attempted rape that ends up with the woman safe but the man's brains splashed all over the outback, there's a good bit of murdering but mostly, you know, the genteel kind.  No sex at all, overtly. Can we appreciate this cover for a minute, though?  I love a good "women running away from houses" Gothic cover, but this one is really a fine example.