Plot, character, and Justin Cartwright's novel

I'm staying with Justin Cartwright's 2004 novel The Promise of Happiness (tho still hating that title!) at just beyond the halfway point, 150+ pp or so, mainly because I'm interested in the characters, in particular the father of the Judd family, Charles, probably because he's closest to my cohort/demographic and partly because he's a complicated guy w/ a lot of mixed feelings and regrets. He's sharp and intelligent and a constant critique of the behavior and manners of the younger gen in contemporary London - to the point where he's often rude and insulting, berating some young women for talking too raucously on the Tube (!) or being downright rude to a waiter trying to take his order for Mexican food. This guy's no saint - and in particular we see this in the scene when he heads off to London ostensibly on business (he retains a seat on a charitable foundation run by his former employer) but w/ the real purpose of an unannounced visit to the woman w/ whom he'd had an office affair some 20 years back. He wants her to assure him that he was not a pig - which she does, and tells him she loved him at the time and was a willing accomplice, so to speak. Obviously, this scene would be written differently today, as we're now much more aware that she was being taken advantage of and that he was abusing his authority in the accounting/management firm where he was a senior officer (and she, a secretary). But we do get a glimpse into his moral anguish. The novel centers on the older daughter's release from a NY prison where she'd served time for art theft; some of this I don't believe at all - in particular, it's hard for me to fathom why this young woman would take the fall and let her no-good boyfriend walk off free, and equally hard to believe that her father, Charles, would not visit her over the 3 years of her imprisonment. Perhaps the 2nd half of the novel will shed light on these matters; in any event Cartwright's strength lies not in design of plot, as the plot in this novel just meanders, but he's especially good at quick delineation of character - even the minor characters, like Charles's golfing buddy Clom, who's an obvious cat and an aging "player," even if Charles and his wife, Daphne, don't - or won't - see this.