with this ring Author:leona blair Jesse Slayter, a brilliant, handsome, wealthy young New York banker, and Madelein van Ryn, beautiful and spirited young Philadelphia debutante, seem destined for a happy patrician life in their Fifth Avenue mansion. They start out in love with eachother and eager for a future together, but their paths soon separate. For that privelge golden worl... more »d is shatterted by the most tulmultous decades of this century, so the Slayters' marriage is changed forever by the demands they make upon themselves and upon each other.
To Jesse the only passion is his business, where he manipulates the world of international high finance. His wife, his children, must be secondary. For Madeleine - one of the novel's most compelling characters - there is the need to be needed and the desire for passionate love. She finds that love and is forced to ignore it.
Their daughter, Susannah, is intrigued by her father's banking empire, determined to be a part of it, though her father blocks her plans and keeps secrets from her. Her brother Jonathan, a talented musician, wants no part of his fathers world, even though he is propelled into it - with tragic consequences to the women he loves.
For Jesse Slayter is a man who dazzelez, dominates, and in large part destroys every life he touches - including his own.« less