Rich Again » (Original)

Anna Maxted is the internationally bestselling author of Getting Over It, Running in Heels, Behaving Like Adults, Being Committed, and A Tale of Two Sisters. She lives in London with her husband and their three sons. Vist her online at http://annamaxtedbooks.squarespace.com/.

Walk-in closet full of designer everything? Check. Private Caribbean island? Check. Connection to the aristocracy? Working on it. Cunning, malicious stalker? Double check.

Welcome to the world of the Kents, a charismatic, ambitious, and fabulously wealthy English family with two sisters – one as strong and sparkling as the other is delicate and wounded – who must somehow put their differences aside to keep an unknown enemy from bringing them down. Wild and beautiful Emily Kent has had the world laid at her feet by her ruthless mother and billionaire father – but it's not enough. Gifted with her mother's to-die-for looks, her father's hard-scrabble business sense, and both of her parents' lust for control, Emily is determined to make her own luck by seducing the only man she’s ever wanted, a man who can make her dreams of attaining the heights of old-money English society come true. By contrast, Emily's step-sister, Claudia, is a fragile soul—her mother died when she was five, leaving her to the unkind reign of step-mother Innocence. In an uncharacteristic burst of rebellion, Claudia trades her gilded lifestyle for an ordinary flat and daytime job where she meets the man of her dreams… or so she imagines.

But, Emily and Claudia are caught up in a desperate situation that may be beyond their control. As for their father, disgraced tycoon Jack Kent, and his wife Innocence, they are too obsessed with the fight for supremacy over their vast empire to see that a mighty and sinister opponent is plotting to ruin them all.

Publishers Weekly

Popular Brit Maxted (Running in Heels) rewrites Cinderella for a meaner, more cynical age in a biting saga of a filthy-rich family brought to rack and ruin by a soulless psycho intent on settling an old score. Part social commentary, part thriller, Maxted's novel charts the complicated history of rags-to-riches-times-two Jack Kent, a hotel baron who loses a first wife to an early death, watches an adopted daughter nearly marry her own father, stands by as a wastrel biological daughter squanders her life and love, and is saved by a bitchy and deliciously vindictive second wife. It's a rip-roaring tale with a creepy villain bent on wrecking the family: “I have spent all of my life thinking, plotting, imagining brilliant, twisted ways to make all of you suffer the same unimaginable hell that I did,” he seethes, “and the annoying thing is, you all have the presumption to think it coincidence!” Though the book could lose a good hundred pages and the hopscotching time line can be confusing, when Maxted finds her groove, the flow is smart, crisp and riveting. (Jan.)