Now from the bestselling author of "Our Crowd," The Right People, and The Auerbach Will, comes a mesmerizing story of love, passion, intrigue, and betrayal. It begins with Silas Tarkington, an ambitious man who has risen to the heights of wealth and fame as the founder of the most elegant store in New York. But it is the women - and the secrets - in Si's life that are at the heart of this spellbinding novel, for both are volatile enough to shatter a man's life...or even end it.To those in the upper circles of New York society, Silas Tarkington, hard-driving genius of New York retailing, has it all. By day he oversees Tarkington's, the magnificent store in a renovated Fifth Avenue mansion that is so unique and exclusive that it has become synonymous throughout the world with status, prestige, and power. By night he returns to his lavish apartment and a wife so exquisite that every mannequin in his store bears her breathtaking face.Then suddenly, inexplicably, Si Tarkington is dead. And as his family gathers at his secluded Long Island estate, the first cracks in his legend begin to appear. For Si's real legacy is not his fortune but his secrets...forty years of secrets, and a last will and testament that will rock Consuelo, his stately socialite wife; Miranda, his high-spirited daughter; Blazer, his embittered son...and Diana, his latest and most passionate mistress.But there is more in store for the Tarkington family than Si's will reveals, for just as Miranda wonders if at last the time has come for her to take over her father's store, someone engineers a hostile takeover and she must mount a desperate defense. And even as she allies herself with Tommy Bonham, Tarkington's handsome vice president, her world begins to crumble...as she slowly uncovers a host of frightening truths about the father she adored. Until Miranda is left to face a terrifying possibility: that her tycoon father's mysterious death was not an accident at all...Told with Stephen Birmingham's unique insight into the upper circles of American wealth - the dazzling parties under crystal chandeliers, the snubs and arcane slights of those with old money against the nouveaux riches, the tastes and trends that tell who is in and who is out, and the sexual appetites and marital arrangements of people not like us - Carriage Trade is a story of the American dream, a tempestuous saga of a man's struggle to climb the ladder into a rarefied world where poverty and ugliness don't exist. More than that, it is a tale of family and the passions that do not wither with the passing years but deepen beyond love or pain into the forces that shape our lives and rule our hearts. Read Less