Just Rewards (Emma Harte Series #6) »

Barbara Taylor Bradford started her writing career in the 1960s as a journalist who felt destined to become "a hard-bitten reporter in a dirty trenchcoat." However, her breakout bestseller, A Woman of Substance (1979), sparked her prolific career as the author of thrilling novels of romance and intrigue.

"The Harte saga is as much a force of nature as a work of fiction…the issues at stake still compel readers after 25 years. Bradford understood early on readers' hunger for depictions of women who are strong and powerful and whose values embrace family. A quarter-century ago, Emma Harte crossed the no-woman's-land that once divided family and business, and now generations of readers consider her a role model in their own lives."

—The Washington Post

A main selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club.

Publishers Weekly

Can this be, as advertised, the final episode in the Harte family saga? A Woman of Substance (1979), the story of Emma Harte's triumph over poverty and illegitimacy to found England's greatest department store, and its four sequels were huge bestsellers. Now Emma's great-granddaughter, Linnet O'Neill, must defend the empire and family against evil uncle Jonathan Ainsley. But words such as "granddaughter" and "uncle" don't do justice to the complexities. It takes four and a half pages of front matter to enumerate the Harte, Kallinski and O'Neill clans whose intertwining lives drive the saga. Emma's descendants offer a helping hand to new in-laws-and the reader-by uttering sentences such as these: "Through his great-grandfather, Winston the First, Emma is Gideon's great-great-aunt. But she is also Gideon's great-grandmother, because Emma was my grandmother." Weddings and funerals keep the local caterer busy and offer crescendos of activity, if scant emotion. Although Ainsley's malevolence hovers behind the story and leads to near disasters, there's never a doubt that the strong women will triumph-though not without struggle. Series devotees will take heart at the ending, which hints that Ainsley's evil will survive his death and the struggles will continue offstage even if Bradford lays down her golden pen. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.