For most potential buyers, Franklin Manor was just a huge run-down old house, a former monastery and tuberculosis sanatorium, half buried in Adirondack snow. But to erstwhile professor, Butch Regent, Franklin Manor was a beacon of hope. It would make his bland and unsatisfactory life meaningful. He would buy it, renovate it, and turn it into an artists' retreat. Lack of money, broken pipes, and pitiless cold almost defeat him but for the help of former patients, angels, a growing group of "temporary" guests, a long-dead altar boy, and a mysterious bell. In the end, the arists' retreat is beginning to take shape - but not in a way Regent recognizes.

It's a deep snow, feel-good story in the tradition of Miracle on Fifth Avenue and The Bishop's Wife.