Penny Vincenzi master of the contemporary blockbuster returns with a movingengaging portrait of people coping with a notorious financial disaster and itsunpredi... » 

Penny Vincenzi master of the contemporary blockbuster returns with a movingengaging portrait of people coping with a notorious financial disaster and itsunpredictable emotional repercussions. Set during the boomandbust years ofthe 1980s An Absolute Scandal follows the lives of a group of people drawntogether by their mutual monetary woes when the great financial institutionLloyds undergoes a devastating downturn. For Nigel Cowper this means thedestruction of his family business his wife Lucinda is willing to doeverything she can to help himexcept give up her irresistible lover. Thepowerful charismatic banker Simon Beaumont and his wife a highly successfuladvertising executive lose everything they worked so hard to acquire but theultimate tragedy is something that neither one could have anticipated. Thewelltodo are not the only ones suffering a selfsufficient widow is suddenlydeep in debt a single mother struggles to maintain a comfortable home for herchildren and a schoolmaster and his frustrated wife find that financialproblems deepen the cracks in their troubled marriage. As their lives begin adownward spiral these characters intersect in ways they never saw coming.Written in what has become her signature style of both wit and candor PennyVincenzi draws back the curtain and offers an inside view of the greed andsocial power plays that occur behind the closed doors of uppercrust society .. . where money isnt everything. Sometimes its the only thing. «