Played out against the actual events of the times, Muriel Maddox's novel is an absorbing story of two sisters, Barbara and Annabel Ashford, who grow up in a privileged life in Washington, DC and whose lives take divergent paths. Barbara, the older creative daughter, longs desperately for a baby sister, and when finally Annabel arrives, she is ecstatic. She will now have someone to play with and share secrets with in the house on Tracy Place. But things will turn out far differently than Barbara expected. Set in the wealthy Virginia hunt country and the glamorous capitals of Paris and Beirut,...

Love and violence thrive in the glamorous diplomatic worlds of Washington, Rio de Janeiro and the Texas oil fields in this suspenseful novel that opens in Midland, Texas in the summer of 1949. Midland is a booming oil town, thrust up from the West Texas prairie. Virile young men have flocked out from the East after the Second World War with adventure and the desire for a quick fortune in their veins. "Yalies" theyre called by the Texans and Peter Spaulding is one of them. Twenty-eight, handsome, attractive to women, yet moody and unhappy much of the time, he has broken away from his socialite...