Reared in the splendid excess of her family's London home and country estate; blessed with beauty and a precocious intelligence that has already captured the eye of her empire-building grandfather, Deborah de Kronenegold has everything, or so it seems. But her childhood equilibrium is shattered when she discovers that she is adopted, and when she becomes the object of her father Leslie's malevolence. Upon the deaths of her her grandfather Samuel and her lovely and ill-fated mother Madeleine--and the mysterious disappearance of the will naming deborah Samuel's principal heir--Leslie sets in motion a series of shocking and irrevocable events. Deborah is turned out, and with nothing but her resolve to claim her birthright, she moves to New York, and starts to build a financial empire to rival her father's--and to bring him down.