First published 2005
Harry Stanford commands the kind of wealth and influence that bends politicians and royalty alike. Then one night he goes overboard from his yacht in the Mediterranean, and the empire he built has no one at the helm. His family converges on Boston to settle the estate, and the knives come out fast. Each heir has a claim, a grievance, and a reason to distrust the others. Then a young woman walks in. She says she is Stanford's daughter, kept secret and cut off for years, and she wants what is owed to her. Nobody believes her. Nobody can afford to. The Stanford children close ranks, lawyers circle, and the question of who this woman really is begins to eat at everyone in the room. Sheldon keeps the pressure on across private jets, European estates, and the drawing rooms of the very rich, where manners are a weapon and the truth is always for sale. At the center of it all is a family discovering that their father was a stranger to them, and a stranger who may have known him better than anyone.
Genres: drama, contemporary, adult-fiction, mystery-thriller, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, fast-paced, suspenseful, tense
Tropes: family-conflict, hidden-identity, mysterious-stranger, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Mediterranean, Boston, Europe
Period: Contemporary
388 pages · Paperback · Warner Books
Content warnings: death, murder