Windfall

August 10, 2009
The British have coined a term for the kind of novels Vincenzi writes: bonkbusters. Her most recent one to appear stateside is a prime example: fast-paced, well-written and full of sex. It's set in 1930s London, where the very rich drink champagne with Edward VIII and the Mountbattens, while the poor have too many babies, nonexistent health care and can only afford to follow the antics of their royal family on the radio. Cassia Tallow, trained as a doctor but playing wife and mother when we first meet her, inherits a fortune from her glamorous godmother. The windfall thrusts Cassia back into a world of high society, high fashion and old lovers. It also gives her the opportunity to go back to practicing medicine and ministering to working-class women, which her husband has prevented her from doing. But when Cassia begins to suspect that the money may not be rightfully hers, she goes to dangerous lengths to find the truth. Once again, Vincenzi delivers grade-A entertainment.

September 1, 2009
Cassia Tallow, the independent, only child of a suffragette, wants to be a doctor, but given that she comes of age at the close of World War I, the closest she gets is marrying one. Cassia lives a quiet, pleasant life in West Sussex with her husband and their three children. Until the day she inherits half a million pounds from her sophisticated, slightly eccentric godmother. Suddenly everything is changed; everything is within reach; doors are open to her, and she can do whatever she likes. So Cassia moves to London and splurges on clothes, cars, and anything else she covets that she couldnt afford before. But while shes busy jet-setting around London, hanging out with glamorous people, and trying to restart her medical studies, she realizes that shes hurting her husband and family in more ways than one. Then she begins to wonder where exactly the money she inherited came from. Another stirring novel with an ensemble cast from the prolific and entertaining Vincenzi.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)