John Jakes, the godfather of the historical novel Los Angeles Times, leaves the South to travel north for an epic tale of scandalous doings in one of the worldxs most famous resorts. In the late nineteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island, was a cauldron of undeclared class warfare where reputations were made and lost in a whirlwind of parties and fancied slights. Where giant marble mansions called cottages arose and wherexamid the glamour of yacht races, tennis matches, and costume ballsxdepression, even madness, sometimes followed social failure. In , Sam Driver, railroad mogul and one of the few surviving robber barons of the lawless years after the Civil War, knocks on the door of fabled Newport together with his daughter, Jenny, determined not to be turned away a second time.
